Book_I 



_ M 



FES SOB. ofMOIAL FHILOSOIPHT 
IN THE HJF1TEM.SITX (OF ED IIOITRGH 

a - ^ Q 



LECTURES 

ON 

ETHICS. 

BY 

THOMAS IgjRO WN, M.D. 

LATE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. 



WITH A PREFACE, 

BY 

THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D. 

PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, EDINBURGH. 



EDINBURGH: 
WILLIAM TAIT, PRINCE'S STREET. 

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & Co. LONDON. 
CUMMINGr & FERGUSON, DUBLIN. 

MDCCCXLVL 

I £ si £ 



EDINBURGH : 
Printed by William Tait, 107> Prince's Street. 



PREFACE. 



They who have read Dr. Brown's Lectures must at 
once be sensible, that there is not the same propor- 
tional amount of severe and searching analysis in the 
Ethical part of his course, which they find in the first 
volume, occupied with his investigations and views on 
the Mental Philosophy. This is partly due to the 
nature of the subject. Not that there is not room in 
this department for the exercise of a most profound 
and subtle discrimination, both in making good a just 
description of the mental processes and phenomena 
which have to do with our states of moral judgment 
and moral feeling, and in assigning the objective prin- 
ciples of the science. But over and above the strict 
philosophy of the subject, there is in it a high prac- 
tical importance, possessing in itself the most urgent 
claims on the attention of the Professor; and making 
it indeed an imperative duty that he should pass 
onward from the laws, whether of human emotion or 



PREFACE. 



thought, to the lessons and the obligations of human 
virtue. There was, besides, a great temptation — were 
it for nothing else than the relief and relaxation of 
his students, after the fatigue of those arduous specu- 
lations through which he had before conducted them — 
that he should regale both himself and them, by set- 
ting forth in perspective the grace and loveliness of 
those virtues the principle of which he had just been 
labouring to explore. Let us not wonder, then, that 
the philosophical savant should, on such occasions, 
have become the rhetorician or the monitor ; and. 
indeed, we should have held it an unpardonable defect, 
had he not felt the impulse to communicate of his own 
enthusiasm for the beautiful and the good to the youth 
who sat before him. They who personally knew him 
will at once recognise, in some of the representations 
which are here given, a picture of that very gentleness 
and refinement by which himself was characterized. 
It is this mixture of the more popular and engaging 
with things of abstruser quality w T hi eh, in our opinion, 
makes it so advisable that these Lectures should be 
given to the world in the form of a separate publica- 
tion. 

But it may well and rightly be asked, Does the 
volume now 7 given of Brown's Ethical Lectures, does 
it present us either with a perfect theory of virtue and 
of man's moral constitution on the one hand, or with 
a perfect directory of moral conduct upon the other ? 
Our brief and general reply to this question is, that, 
in cur opinion, such a work still is, and may long 



PREFACE. 



vii 



remain, a desideratum. — not in the literature of Eng- 
land only, but in the literature of the world. But we 
ask in turn, What would have become of any of the 
sciences, all of which are progressive, if no work had 
been valued or recommended till the science had 
reached, (what none of the sciences has yet done, and 
perhaps never will in our present state,) — had reached 
its point of greatest possible advancement, and a trea- 
tise could have been written upon it in a style alto- 
gether worthy of the then attained optimism ? There is 
many a book which has failed, and must necessarily 
fail, in giving the full and perfect exposition of a sub- 
ject ; and which yet deserves a high, and it may even 
be for a time the highest place, in the literature of the 
subject. It is upon the strength of each successive 
work, as by the footsteps of an ascending ladder, that 
all science is carried upward to higher and higher 
elevations, — keeping its ground perhaps for a genera- 
tion or two, and yet not superseding its predecessors, 
so as that they shall altogether vanish for some aires 
at least from the sight and remembrance of the lite- 
rary public. Such has been the history of learning 
from the beginning of the world ; and hence the dan- 
ger of coming forth with a eulogy on a work which 
might be altogether preposterous, if given without 
respect, to the future enlargements, or even the future 
corrections, that may be awaiting its doctrines and its 
views. It is true that a Professor in a college is in 
the best and likeliest circumstances for the prepara- 
tion of a treatise on the subject of his own chair, which 



viii 



PREFACE. 



might bid fair, if not to be complete, — for who can 
assign a limit to any of the sciences ? — at least, as far 
as it goes, to be invulnerable. By the successive 
modelling and remodelling, year after year, of the 
prelections which he delivers, he may bequeath to his 
successors a specimen of very choice authorship. It 
is true we read in the Life of Dr. Brown that he 
added and amended very little upon his course, after 
the second year of his professorship. But another 
explanation might be given of this than that he 
thought his preparations did not admit either of 
further enlargement or further rectification ; though 
it must be allowed by all to have been a truly mar- 
vellous achievement that so great a work should have 
been accomplished within so brief a period. My own 
theory, however, on the matter is, the dislike, which 
Dr. Brown may have shared in with some other 
authors, to the business of recasting, or retouching in 
any way, their older compositions. It seems to me 
identical with the dislike which many painters feel at 
making a copy of their own pictures ; and so both the 
writer and the artist find themselves more congenially 
employed when engaged with new works and new 
objects altogether. But whatever cause may be 
assigned for this peculiarity in the construction of 
Brown's Lectures, it hinders not that the volume to 
which we now prefix these sentences may both be 
entitled to a most respectful attention from every 
student of moral science, and to a place in many a 
o-enerai library ; and vet that there might remain 



PREFACE. 



much to supplement, and some things to modify, ere 
a work shall be framed which might abide a text- 
book and a standard work upon Ethical Science to all 
generations. 

With these explanations, we feel ourselves at per- 
fect liberty either to animadvert upon, or to eulogize, 
the various passages of this w r ork, just as we find 
occasion. We have been called upon to w r rite a recom- 
mendatory preface : But, besides the presumption of 
such an unnecessary office for a work of such high 
public estimation, w r e hold it a better introduction to 
any work, if a heading for it be at all required, that, 
instead of an unqualified panegyric, it should be more 
in the character of an honest and impartial review. 
But the very few pages w r e can afford forbid any for- 
mal undertaking of this sort ; and meanwhile — where 
there is such a body of sound principle so ably and 
eloquently advocated, and such an immeasurable 
superiority over all the merely human systems of 
Moral Philosophy, or those wdiere the science is 
treated apart from Revelation, which we are ac- 
quainted with — we are most unwilling to refuse our 
testimony, and the more as w r e are permitted to accom- 
pany it with such suggestions as w 7 e venture to think 
might be profitable to the reader. We have only to 
apologize for the sententious air of the deliverances 
which follow,— sententious, because wdthin our narrow^ 
limits, necessarily short, and not because framed in an 
authoritative or unkind spirit towards one whose writ- 
ings, w T hen taken in conjunction with those of certain 

a 2 



X 



PREFACE. 



others, and more especially of Bishop Butler and 
Dugald Stewart, might — once that the philosophy of 
the Christian argument is better understood — prove 
eminently helpful in propitiating the higher reason of 
the country, and gaining it over to the sacred cause 
of Truth and Righteousness. 

First, then, we are persuaded, that had he revised 
these rapidly prepared, and, because gotten up with 
something like the speed and power of magic, for the 
exigencies of a class, these wonderful Lectures, — had 
he revised them into a wary and well-digested treatise, 
we feel hopeful that not one expression would have 
escaped from him, which could have at all counte- 
nanced the idea that virtue was a thing of mere arbi- 
trary constitution, or at all dependent for its reality 
and being on the mere organism of man's moral nature. 
The truth is, that his own Natural Theology, apart 
from the scripture which tells us that God made man 
in His own image, leads to a different conclusion. 
We can certainly imagine a race so constituted as to 
do homage to a standard and code of morality different 
from, nay opposite to, our own in all its articles. But 
then, as Dr. Brown well expresses it, we must have 
been created by a different Being from Him, who, in 
constituting us such as w T e are, hath given us an irre- 
sistible evidence for the virtues of our estimation 
having had their residence, as so many eternal verities, 
in the constitution of the Godhead. The habit of sub- 
stituting for the objective reality of things the feelings 
or the perceptions of our own minds, would lead, if 



PREFACE, 



xi 



carried out, to a universal Pyrrhonism, from which 
our only refuge is in the belief of a Deity. We can 
fancy an atheist to limit the reign and the reality of 
virtue, by looking on it as commensurate only with 
the species. But he who believes " the universality 
of virtue to be coextensive with the minds in which 
its emotions arise," (p. 25,) and further believes that 
he thus feels because thus fashioned by the hand and 
#fter the mind of the Deity, must mean a great deal 
more by the essential distinctions of morality ; and, 
carrying the speculation upward to the Being in whom 
these emotions originate, must regard virtue as a 
thing of stable existence, having its fixed and concrete 
reality in the divine nature. 

But the very principle on which w r e should modify 
certain expressions of Dr. Brown, in regard to the 
objective and the subjective of human virtue, is the 
principle on which we hold him to be so eminently 
sound in his observations on what he has chosen to 
designate as the Theological System of Morals. Our 
only exception, in fact, is to the title which he has 
affixed to it. The theory which resolves all virtue 
into the law or will of God, may be termed, or as some, 
we fear, would feel, may be stigmatized, by having the 
name fastened on it of the Theological System of 
Ethics. We can only say that it is not the Ethical 
System of our best theologians. We are sure that it 
forms no part of the creed or theology of those whom 
we hold to be the soundest and ablest thinkers in our 
science. The primary fountain-head of morality is 



xii 



PREFACE. 



placed by them, not in the will of God, but in what is 
prior to will, and to all jurisprudence, — in the nature 
of God. Virtue, when impressed on a tablet of juris- 
prudence, whether regarded as the law of the heart or 
as the law of a written revelation, they hold to be but 
a transcript from the anterior tablet of the divine cha- 
racter. It is true that, along with Dr. Brown, they 
esteem it as the prime duty of man to obey the will 
of God ; but not because that will is the creator of 
virtue, which, uncreated as the Deity himself, forms 
the eternal rectitude of an eternal and all-perfect 
Being. On this subject, along with the single objec- 
tion we have made to his nomenclature, we hold 
Dr. Brown to have argued most ably and success- 
fully ; and can assure his many philosophical admirers 
that our best and highest theologians think with him 
— that virtue is right, not because God wills it, but 
that God wills it because it is right. 

And there is another most important coincidence 
between the ethical views of Dr. Brown and what is 
conceived by the ablest expounders of Christian truth 
to be orthodox in theology. We esteem it to be one 
of his most successful achievements, the utter demoli- 
tion which he has effected of the Selfish System of 
Morals; in which category is included the Moral 
Philosophy of Dr. Paley, as being but an enlargement 
of the Selfish System — the one, properly so called, 
making the essence of virtue to lie in the pursuit of 
our own good in time; and the other, still in the 
pursuit of our own good, but of our good in eternity. 



PREFACE. 



xiii 



The principle which most avails him in the work of 
refutation is that for which the world w T as first indebted 
to Bishop Butler, in one of his Fifteen Sermons, 
which, taken all in all, form a most invaluable reper- 
tory of sound ethical doctrine, whether as grounded 
on the lessons of strictly moral science, or on the 
admirable and original views presented by their 
author, of man's moral constitution. The principle 
to which we now advert is the distinction which 
Butler so well elucidates, between the object on which 
our affection rests and terminates, and the accom- 
panying pleasure which is felt in the indulgence of 
that affection. The object of a virtuous affection is 
distinct from the pleasure which accompanies its 
indulgence ; and yet the stronger and more intense 
that affection, the greater will be the enjoyment that 
is yielded by its gratification. And so the object of 
our love to God is God himself, and not the plea- 
sure that we feel in loving Him ; and yet the more 
intense that love, and so the freer from all taint of 
selfishness, the greater will be the enjoyment of self; 
or, in other words, the more disinterested the affec- 
tion, the greater will be that resulting happiness 
w T hichi is at once its consequence and its reward. 
Would that the evangelical system w r ere better under- 
stood by academic men — when it w r ould at once be 
recognised that it stands not more distinguished from 
the meagre and less peculiar forms w T hich are opposed 
to it, by the articles of its creed, than by the purer 
and loftier virtues of its practical directory. The 



xiv 



PREFACE. 



distaste for its scriptural and practical technology 
might at length give way. should it come to be per- 
ceived that the true design of the economy which it 
unfolds is the restoration to man of that godlike 
character which, in the eye of our best philosophers 
and our best poets, forms the optimum raarciraum of 
morality — an elevation never to be attained but 
through a process which the Bible describes in its 
own language, when it tells of our being " sanctified 
by faith,*" and our being " renewed after the image of 
Him who created us in righteousness and true holi- 
ness.'' 1 

We strongly recommend to the readers of this 
volume that they peruse along with it the Sermons 
of Bishop Butler, as two w T orks, both of which stand 
alike high in the existent literature of Moral Philo- 
sophy, and both peculiarly fitted to be the guides 
and the accompaniments, and perhaps in some in- 
stances the correctives of each other. It will be found 
in particular that the singularly able and conclusive 
reasoning of Brown against the System of Utility, 
derives its utmost degree of strength and illustration 
from the distinction already referred to, as having 
been first made by Butler, between the terminating 
object of any mental tendency or desire, and the 
pleasure which attends the indulgence of it. He by 
this single distinction has laid the axe to the root 
both of the Selfish System in Morals and of the 
System of Utility ; and in the felicitous analogy 
which he has pointed out between any of our special 



PREFACE. 



XV 



affections, the virtuous affection if we will, and the 
appetite of hunger — we are made clearly to perceive 
the principle on which the refutation of both these 
theories might be made to rest. There is an instant 
pleasure to self in the exercise of compassion, just as 
there is an instant pleasure to self in the act of eating; 
yet the pleasure in neither of these cases is the object 
in view — that object being in the one case the relief 
of a fellow-creature in distress, and in the other the 
relief of hunger. And there is a posterior benefit 
both to self and to society in all the virtues, as, for 
example, veracity and justice, just as there is a 
posterior benefit to the animal economy in the use of 
food; yet, without either of these benefits being in 
view, man will eat under the impulse of hunger, and 
he will act virtuously under the impellent calls of 
truth, and integrity, and honour. There are other 
subjects besides on which the reader will attain to a 
greater satisfaction and sense of fulness, by reading 
the two authors in conjunction, and thus blending 
together the lights which are respectively cast on 
their common argument : first, by the sagacity of 
Butler, and then by the ingenuity along with the 
fine flowing illustrative eloquence and the inimitable 
touches of grace and delicacy which are strewn over 
the field of his inquiries by Dr. Thomas Brown. But. 
in his masterly exposure of Smith's Theory of Moral 
Sentiments, the latter of those two great metaphysi- 
cians and moralists whom we have now been comparing 
together, necessarily stands alone ; and we gladly 



xvi 



PREFACE. 



refer to this chapter of his work, as one of the happiest 
specimens of his great argumentative and analytic 
powers. 

But there is one other occasion on which Butler 
must be called in as an indispensable auxiliary, to 
rectify and supplement what we cannot help regarding 
as a serious deficiency in the speculations of Dr. 
Brown, who has not once adverted to the greatest 
discovery, and in itself the most important and precious 
truth within the whole compass of ethical science ; 
we mean the famous doctrine which, though felt in 
all ages and by every possessor of a moral nature, 
was first announced to the world bv the illustrious 
English prelate, under the title of the Supremacy of 
Conscience. The doctrine itself cannot be got rid of 
by any exceptions which might be taken to this title, 
or even though Dr. Brown should have succeeded in 
his condemnation of the name ; for he will never be 
able to rid us of the notion of a moral sense. But 
the truth is that we like his conception, and hold it 
to be a felicitous one, by which, instead of viewing the 
mind as we should an organic structure, made up of 
various faculties and parts, he looks on the mind as 
one and indivisible, but with the susceptibility, at the 
same time, of passing into various states ; so that it 
is the whole mind which at one time wills, and at 
another time remembers, and at another time judges, 
and at another feels a moral recoil from one sort of 
deed or character and a lively moral approbation of 
another. We do not quarrel with that mode of 



PREFACE. 



xvii 



apprehending the matter, according to which all these 
are viewed as distinct states rather than as distinct 
faculties of the mind — though, for the convenience of 
language and its needful abbreviation, there must for 
each class of like phenomena be devised one summary 
expression, that might be comprehensive of them all ; 
and so we have had recourse to the general w T ords of 
will, and memory, and judgment : nor can we very 
well see why the class of our moral phenomena and 
feelings should not have the advantage of some such 
generical term, too, and the moral sense should not 
continue to be employed as the brief and comprehen- 
sive designation of them. For ourselves, we no more 
object to the language which tells of a moral sense 
than w r e should object to the language which tells of 
a moral nature ; nor do we feel that we any more 
violate the simplicity of the mind in the employment 
of such language, than we violate the simplicity of 
any material substance, as lead, w r hen we speak of its 
fusibility, or any other of the properties which belong 
to it. On the application of a certain heat to this 
metal, it passes into a state of fluidity ; just as in the 
contemplation of certain acts, be they good or evil, the 
mind passes into the state of moral feeling. Nor do 
w r e perceive any violence done to the philosophy of 
either subject when w r e speak of fusibility as a pro- 
perty or power in the one case, or of the conscience 
and moral sense as being one of the powers or pro- 
perties of mind in the other. But, be this as it may, 
the glorious doctrine, or as it may be termed the 



xviii 



PREFACE. 



glorious discovery of Bishop Butler, can no more be 
got rid of by Dr. Brown's proposed reform in the 
nomenclature of the science, than by the hypothesis 
of Sir James Mackintosh respecting the generation of 
the human conscience. Let the phenomena and feelings 
of our moral nature be reduced to whatever term of 
phraseology, or to whatever process of formation they 
may, the doctrine of Butler can in no w T ay be got rid 
of but by an inadequate and therefore untrue descrip- 
tion of the phenomena themselves. It is enough that 
in every instance of a moral wrong, there is along 
with the recoil of an offended moral sensibility, the 
plaint and remonstrance of a felt invasion on a rightful 
sovereignty — the sovereignty of what may not in fact, 
but what ought injustice, to be a ruling principle of 
the mind. The supremacy of conscience is but a 
compendious expression for the thousands and thou- 
sands of such phenomena, of constant and every day 
occurrence wherever humanity is to be found. It 
may not be at all times, nay it may seldom in our 
degenerate race, be the sovereign de facto ; but it is 
recognised and done universal homage to, as the 
sovereign de jure — the homage, we mean, of a felt con- 
viction, though not of an actual obedience. The 
loyalty to virtue may be universally fallen from, and 
yet it be universally felt that the loyalty is due. 
Now, in the descriptions of Dr. Brown, the moral 
emotion seems as if bereft of this capital and most 
important peculiarity, and spoken of only as one of 
the many forces which come into play within the 



PREFACE. 



xix 



human constitution — there to meet with other forces 
which, according to the relative degree of their pre- 
valence and power, may or may not have the supe- 
riority over it. That they often have the actual 
superiority is the melancholy experience of all history : 
but the rightful superiority of the moral element 
always remains with it, having the suffrages and the 
sentiments of all men in its favour — its place in the 
mechanism of our spirits being that of a regulator in 
a watch, making it clear, even amid the aberrations 
and disturbances of a machinery which had gone into 
disorder, that as the time-piece was made to move 
regularly, so man was made to move virtuously. We 
have no space for the further illustrations which 
might be given of this subject ; but would earnestly 
advise the reader of this volume to supplement the 
deficiency of which we complain, by a careful perusal 
and study of Bishop Butler's Sermons upon Human 
Nature. 

His treatment of the elementary questions in morals, 
forms the most philosophical part of this volume. 
When he passes from these to the description and 
detail of the particular virtues, he very much drops 
the analyst ; and, instead of a laborious and severe 
scrutiny into first principles, sets before his readers 
the most beautiful sketches and representations of 
character. Our only remark is, that in the glowing 
rapidity of these compositions, the student may be 
betrayed into a forgetfulness of the lessons which had 
formerly been given to him — as, for example, when 



XX 



PREFACE. 



following his great master, while he expatiates on the 
excellencies of truth and justice, he may be apt to 
lose sight of the argument by wdiich the system of 
utility had been so ably disposed of; and, because of 
the undoubted subservience of these two moralities to 
the good of society, which is chiefly dwelt upon in 
this passage of the work, is in some danger after all of 
becoming a utilitarian. It is here that the exuberant 
eloquence of Dr. Browm requires to be chastened by 
the more cautious statements of Dugald Stewart on 
this subject, in his " Outlines of Moral Philosophy.' 1 
It is true that Dr. Brown had previously demon- 
strated, in grappling w 7 ith the theory of Hume, that 
though all the virtues were useful, it is not utility 
which constitutes all virtuousness ; and the actual 
harmony which obtains between the beneficial and the 
right, he regards as a contingent harmony, which he 
resolves into the will of God : so that, instead of 
perverting this great and undoubted fact, in order to 
vitiate the ethical system, he turns it to the proper 
and legitimate purpose of strengthening therewith the 
foundations of Natural Theology. And it is further 
true, that Dugald Stew r art concedes the possibility of 
benevolence, or a regard to utility, being the sole 
principle of action in the Deity. Instead of w r hich, 
we should look both on truth and justice as having an 
independent virtuousness of their own, even in the 
character of the Deity; nor can we help regarding 
the doctrine of the atonement, as a most impressive 
evidence in favour of this opinion, and as definitively 



PKEFACE. 



XX 



fixing what, amid the contest of these great authori- 
ties, seems to be conjectural and loose in the specula- 
tions of philosophy. It appears to us, however, that 
Dr. Brown has fallen into an error which is not 
chargeable upon Stewart, when he affirms that for 
every duty between man and man, there is an obliga- 
tion on the one side, and a counterpart right on the 
other. It is the duty of all men to be honest and 
true ; and all men have a right to the payment of the 
debts which are owing, or the fulfilment of the pro- 
mises which have been made to them. But it follows 
not, that because it may be the duty of one man to be 
benevolent to another, this other has therefore a right 
to his benevolence. And it were a contradiction in 
terms to say, that when it may be the duty of one man 
to forgive an offender, the offender has therefore & right 
to forgiveness. It is therefore more than a factitious 
or scholastic distinction, which has been instituted 
between the duties of perfect and imperfect obligation, 
whatever objections may lie against the language 
which expresses it. The distinction itself has a real 
foundation in man's moral nature, and by not pro- 
ceeding on it the most serious evils have been com- 
mitted in the business of legislation. 

But while we have held it our duty to point out 
some of the articles in his ethical creed on which we 
differ from our estimable author, we should hold it, at 
the same time, a most serious deficiency on the part 
of the ethical student, not to be fully acquainted with 
him. There are some doctrines in the science which 



xxii 



PREFACE. 



lie has done so much to illustrate and adorn, in which 
still there remains much to controvert and much to 
be settled, ere they can be so conclusively and fully 
established as to meet with universal acceptance. 
But the beauty of such moral pictures as he has 
drawn, and an enthusiasm like his on the side of 
goodness and truth, must find an echo in every 
bosom ; and will meet with an abiding testimony 
from men of wisdom and worth throughout all ages. 

We can spare but one word for the Natural 
Theology, which concludes this volume. It deserves 
a high rank among the highest works of this class ; 
almost all of which, however, treat the subject with- 
out any the most distant attempt to assign the 
relation in which it stands to the Christian Theology. 
Now holding, as we do, that the most important 
function of the Natural, is that of guiding the way to 
our Revealed Theology, by evincing how it is that 
the desiderata of the one are met by the counterpart 
doctrines of the other, we cannot but express our 
preference for such treatises as serve to demonstrate 
the harmony between them, thus making Natural 
Theology fulfil the purpose ascribed to the law of 
bringing men to Christ. 

These strictures on the works of Dr Brown, do not 
proceed from any feeling of hostility, but are prompted 
by our high sense of their importance. We could 
speak not merely of our great estimation, but of our 
personal gratitude for his writings. There is no 
author who has not expressly treated of revelation, 



PREFACE. 



xxiii 



whose mental philosophy suggests so many accordances 
between the science of mind and the subject-matter of 
Christianity. From the wide territory of thought 
over which he expatiates, there is no enlightened 
student, enlightened we mean both in philosophy and 
in holy writ, who might not gather from it fresh 
proofs and illustrations on the side of the Christian 
argument. And even for the practical objects, we are 
persuaded, whether of the Christian teacher whose 
office it is to prepare the weekly lessons of the pulpit 
for the instruction of his fellow-men, or of the Christian 
scholar who is bent on the advancement of his own 
personal religion — should either of them but dwell 
thoughtfully and intelligently on the pages of Dr. 
Brown, he will find, of many views which are given 
there of the workings of our nature, that they shed a 
pleasing and confirmatory light on what may be 
termed the moral dynamics of the gospel. 

Among Christians, there is often a sensitive jealousy 
and dislike of all human philosophy — a sickliness 
and fearfulness of recoil from it, wherewith we can- 
not in the least sympathize. We only wish they 
could ponder and apply the declaration of Scripture, 
that " to the pure all things are pure." There is a 
certain haleness of moral temperament, which can 
select, and appropriate., and assimilate, much of what 
it gathers from all the quarters of human speculation; 
and thus feeds what it thrives upon. The apostle 
Paul exemplifies this largeness of survey ; and we 
should say, that, as distinguished from the others — for 



xxiv 



PRKFACE. 



their common inspiration did not overbear the natural 
and complexional differences between them — he was 
the best qualified, and so the most successful of them 
all, both for giving forth the deliverances of a strong, 
healthful, and enlightened mind on those questions of 
causistry which perplexed and agitated the weaker 
brethren in the church, and also for holding converse 
with the samns of his day. Such was the habit of the 
late Dr. Abercrombie ; and, from the popularity of his 
writings, we argue a nearer approximation and better 
understanding than heretofore, between the scientific 
and the sacred even in the higher regions of the 
literary commonwealth. 

And, in conclusion, we would tell those of far humbler 
attainment in learning, that they should make a study 
of the lessons, here so tastefully and persuasively given, 
of purity, and kindness, and honour ; and that, with 
the higher aids and expedients which the gospel of 
Jesus Christ has placed within their reach, they should 
labour to realize them. This were not a deviation from 
their holy and heavenward path, but in direct fulfil- 
ment of the apostolic injunction — " Whatsoever 
things are true, whatsoever things are honest, what- 
soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are 
of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be 
any praise, think on these things.' 1 ' 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE L 

Nature of Ethics, or Moral Philosophy. — Of the Nature and 
Source of our Notions of Virtue. — Obligation, Virtue, Merit. 
— They differ only in their Relation to Time. — What is an 
Action, in Morals ? Page 1 



LECTURE II. 

Recapitulation. — Apparent Exceptions to the Doctrines of the 
preceding Lecture. — Sophistry of contending that Moral Dis- 
tinctions are Accidental. — When the Mind is incapable of 
perceiving Moral Distinctions. — Effects of Passion, Com- 
plexity ; and the misleading Influence of Association, . 16 



LECTURE III. 



Retrospect of last Lecture. — The Primary Distinctions of 
Morality implanted in every Human Heart, and never com- 
pletely effaced, 37 



LECTURE IV. 

Of the System of Mandeville. — Of the Influence of Reason on 
our Moral Sentiments. — Of the Systems of Clarke and Wol- 
laston, 56 



LECTURE V. 



Of Hume's System, that Utility is the Constituent or Measure 
of Virtue, . 74 



XXVI CONTENTS. 

LECTURE VI. 

Examination of Hume's System, concluded— Of the Selfish 
System, Page 94 

LECTURE VII. 

Examination of the Selfish System, and its Modifications, con- 
tinued. — Dr. Paiey's System, 115 

LECTURE VIII. 

Examination of the Selfish System, concluded. — Examination of 
Dr. Smith's System, .135 

LECTURE IX. 

Examination of Dr. Smith's System, concluded. — Recapitulation 
of the Doctrines of Moral Approbation, . . . 156 



LECTURE X. 

Of the use of the term Moral Sense. — Dr. Hutcheson's System. 
— Dr. Cudworth's, and Dr. Price's. — Arrangement of the 
Practical Virtues, . . . . . . . 176 



LECTURE XL 

Division of the Practical Virtues into three classes : Duties that 
relate primarily to Others ; Duties that relate directly to 
Ourselves ; and Duties to God. — The Duties that primarily 
relate to Others, 197 



LECTURE XII. 

Of our Negative Duties to Others : Abstaining from robbing them 
of" the Affections of Others. — Of abstaining from injuring the 
Character of Others. — Of Veracity, .... 215 



CONTENTS. XXVU 



LECTURE XIII. 

Of our Negative Duties, continued. — Of abstaining from injuring 
the Virtue of Others, either directly by our Seductions, or in- 
directly by our Example. — Of abstaining from injuring the 
Mental Tranquillity of others, .... Page 233 



LECTURE XIV. 

Of our Positive Duties. — Of the Duties of Benevolence. — True 
Politeness. — Pecuniary Liberalities, .... 251 



LECTURE XV. 

Of the Positive Duties which we owe to certain Individuals 
only, arising from Affinity, Friendship, Benefits received, 
Contract. — Of the Parental Duties, .... 266 



LECTURE XVI. 

Of the Duties of Affinity. — Parental Duties. — Filial Duties. 

— Fraternal Duties. — Conjugal Duties, .... 235 



LECTURE XVII. 
Of the Duties of Friendship.— Duties of Gratitude, . . 303 

LECTURE XVIII. 

Of the Duties of Contract ; Master and Servant. — Of the Duties 
of Citizenship ; Obedience to the Laws, . . . 321 



LECTURE XIX. 

Of the Duties of Citizenship ; Obedience to the Laws. — 
Theory of a Social Contract ; Right to resist Authority. 
Duty of Defending our Country. — Augmenting the General 
Happiness. — Duty of Reforming bad Laws. — Duty of resisting 
improper Innovations. — Of the Reforming Spirit in Princes. 
— Of the Hypocrisy of Patriotism. — General remarks on 
Rights, 333 



xxviii 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE XX. 
Of the Existence of the Deity, .... Page 35.9 

LECTURE XXI. 

Of the Existence, the Unity, the Omniscience, the Omnipo- 
tence, and the Goodness of the Deity, . . . . 376 

LECTURE XXII. 
Of the Goodness of the Deity. — Objections obviated, . . 394 

LECTURE XXIII. 

Of the Goodness of the Deity. — Objections obviated. — Of our 
Duties to the Deity, 412 

LECTURE XXIV. 
Of the Immortality of the Soul, 428 

LECTURE XXV. 
Of the Immortality of the Soul, 449 

LECTURE XXVI. 

Retrospect of the Argument for the Immortality of the Soul. — 
Of our Duty to Ourselves. — Cultivation of Moral Excellence, 467 

LECTURE XXVII. 

Of our Duty to Ourselves. — Cultivation of Happiness. — Doc- 
trines of Epicurus and Zeno. — Philosophy of the Stoics. — Of 
the Pleasures of the Senses. — Influence of Intemperance, 486 



LECTURE XXVIII. 



Of' our Duty to Ourselves. — Cultivation of Intellectual, Moral, 
and Religious Happiness, . . . . . 506 



LECTURES ON ETHICS; 

or, • 

MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 



LECTURE I. 

• 

NATURE OF ETHICS, OR MORAL PHILOSOPHY. — OBLIGATION, VIRTUE, 
MERIT. — THEY DIFFER ONLY IN THEIR RELATION TO TIME. — WHAT IS 
AN ACTION, IN MORALS ? 

The science of Ethics has relation to our affections of 
mind, not simply as phenomena, but as virtuous or vicious, 
right or wrong. 

Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimur, ordo 
Quis datus, aut metae quam mollis flexus, et unde ; 
Q,uis modus argento, quid fas optare, quid asper 
Utile nummus habet : patriae, charisque propinquis 
Quantum elargiri deceat : quern te Deus esse 
Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re. 1 

In the consideration of questions such as these, we feel 
indeed that philosophy is something more than knowledge, 
— that it at once instructs and amends us, — blending, as a 
living and active principle, in our moral constitution, and 



1 Persius, Satira III. 67-72. 



B 



2 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



purifying our affections and desires, not merely after they 
have arisen, but in their very source. It is thus, in its re- 
lation to our conduct, truly worthy, and worthy in a pecu- 
liar sense, of that noble etymology which a Roman philo- 
sopher has assigned to it as the most liberal of studies. 
" Quare liberalia studia dicta sint vides ; quia homine libero 
digna sunt. Ceterum unum studium vere liberale est, quod 
liberum facit : hoc sapientiae, sublime, forte, magnanimuin, 
caetera pusilla et puerilia sunt." The knowledge of virtue 
is indeed that only knowledge which makes man free ; and 
the philosophy which has this for its object, does not merely 
teach us what we are to do, but affords us the highest aids 
and incitements, when the toil of virtue might seem difficult, 
by pointing out to us, not the glory only, but the charms 
and tranquil delight of that excellence which is before us, 
and the horrors of that internal shame which we avoid, by 
continuing steadily our career. Its office is thus, in a great 
measure, to be the guardian of our happiness, by guarding 
that without which there is no happiness, — 

Whether, on the rosy mead, 
When Summer smiles, to warn the melting heart 
Of Luxury's allurement; whether, firm 
Against the torrent, and the stubborn hill, 
To urge free Virtue's steps, and to her side 
Summon that strong divinity of soul 
Which conquers Chance and Fate ; or on the height 
The goal assign'd her, haply to proclaim 
Her triumph; on her brow to place the crown 
Of uncorrupted praise; through future worlds 
To follow her interminated way, 
And bless Heaven's image in the heart of man. 1 

What, then, is the virtue which it is the practical object 
of this science to recommend ? 

The natural state of man is a state of society. — 

1 Pleasures of Imagination, second form of the poem, Bo^& I* 
504-515. 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



That man, so existing in society, is capable of receiving 
from others benefit or injury, and, in his turn, of benefiting 
or injuring them by his actions, is a mere physical fact, as 
to which there cannot be any dispute. 

But though the physical fact of benefit or injury is all 
which we consider in the action of inanimate things, it is far 
from being all of which we think in the case of voluntary 
agents, when there is not merely benefit or injury produced, 
but a previous intention of producing it. In every case of this 
kind in which we regard the agent as willing that particular 
good or evil which he may have produced, there arise certain 
distinctive emotions of moral approbation or disapprobation. 
We regard the action in every such case, when the benefit or 
injury is believed by us to have entered into the intention 
of him who performed the action, not as advantageous or 
hurtful only, but as right or wrong ; or, in other words, the 
person who performed the particular action, seems to us to 
hav r e moral merit or demerit in that particular action. 

To say that any action which we are considering is right 
or wrong, and to say that the person who performed it has 
moral merit or demerit, are to say precisely the same thing ; 
though writers on the theory of morals have endeavoured 
to make these different questions, and have even multiplied 
the question still more by other divisions, which seem to 
me to be only varieties of tautological expression, or at 
least to be, as we shall find, only the reference to different 
objects of one simple feeling of the mind. 

When certain actions are witnessed by us, or described 
to us, they excite instantly certain vivid feelings, distinctive 
to us of the agent, as virtuous or vicious, worthy or un- 
worthy of esteem. His action, we say, is right, himself 
meritorious. But are these moral estimates of the action 
and of the agent founded on different feelings ; or do we not 
mean simply, that he, performing this action, excites in us 
a feeling of moral approbation or disapprobation, and that 
all others, in similar circumstances, performing the same 



4 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



action, that is to say, willing, in relations exactly similar, 
a similar amount of benefit or injury, for the sake of that 
very benefit or injury, will excite in us a similar feeling of 
approbation in the one case, of disapprobation in the other 
case ? The action cannot truly have any quality which the 
agent has not, because the action is truly nothing, unless as 
significant of the agent whom we know, or of some other 
agent whom we imagine. Virtue, as distinct from the 
virtuous person, is a mere name ; as is vice, distinct from the 
vicious. The action, if it be any thing more than a mere 
insignificant word, is a certain agent in certain circumstances, 
willing and producing a certain effect; and the emotion, 
whatever it may be, excited by the action, is, in truth, and 
must always be, the emotion excited by an agent real or 
supposed. We may speak of the fulfilment of duty, virtue, 
propriety, merit, and we may ascribe these variously to the 
action, and to him who performed it ; but whether we speak 
of the action or of the agent, we mean nothing more than 
that a certain feeling of moral approbation has been excited 
in our mind by the contemplation of a certain intentional 
production, in certain circumstances, of a certain amount of 
benefit or injury. When we think within ourselves, Is this 
what we ought to do ? we do not make two inquiries, first, 
whether the action be right, and then, whether we should 
not have merit in doing what is wrong, or demerit in doing 
what is right for us to do ; we only consider whether, doing 
it, we shall excite in others approbation or disapprobation, 
and in ourselves a corresponding emotion of complacency 
or remorse. According to the answer which we give to our 
own heart, in this respect, an answer which relates to the 
single feeling of moral approbation or disapprobation, we 
shall conceive that we are doing what we ought to do, or 
what we ought not to do ; and knowing this, we can have 
no further moral inquiry to make as to the merit or demerit 
of doing what is previously felt by us to be right or wrong. 
Much of the. perplexity which has attended inquiries into 



/ 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



5 



the theory of morals, has arisen, I have little doubt, from 
distinctions which seemed to those who made them to be 
the result of nice and accurate analysis, but in which the 
analysis was verbal only, not real, or at least related to the 
varying circumstances of the action, not to the moral senti- 
ment which the particular action in certain particular 
circumstances excited. What is it which constitutes an 
action virtuous ? What is it which constitutes the moral 
obligation to perform certain actions? What is it which 
constitutes the merit of him who performs certain actions? 
These have been considered as questions essentially distinct ; 
and because philosophers have been perplexed in attempting 
to give different answers to all these questions, and have 
still thought that different answers were necessary, they 
have wondered at difficulties which themselves created, and 
struggling to discover what could not be discovered, have 
often, from this very circumstance, been led into a scepticism 
which otherwise they might have avoided, or have stated 
so many unmeaning distinctions as to furnish occasion of 
ridicule and scepticism to others. One simple proposition 
has been converted into an endless circle of propositions, 
each proving and proved by that which precedes or follows 
it. Why has any one merit in a particular action ? Be- 
cause he has done an action that was virtuous. And why 
was it virtuous ? Because it was an action which it was 
his duty, in such circumstances, to do. And why was it 
his duty to do it in such circumstances ? Because there was 
a moral obligation to perform it. And why do we say that 
there was a moral obligation to perform it ? Because if he 
had not performed it he would have violated his duty, and 
been unworthy of our approbation. In this circle we might 
proceed for ever, with the semblance of reasoning, indeed, 
hut only with the semblance ; our answers, though verbally 
different, being merely the same proposition repeated in 
different forms, and requiring, therefore, in all its forms, 
to be proved, or not requiring proof in any. To have 



6 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



merit to be virtuous, to have done our duty, to have acted 
in conformity with obligation; all have reference to one 
feeling of the mind, that feeling of approbation which 
attends the consideration of various actions. They are 
merely, as I have said, different modes of stating one 
simple truth; that the contemplation of any one, acting 
as we have done in a particular case, excites a feeling of 
moral approval. 

To this simple proposition, therefore, we must always 
come in our moral estimate, whatever divisions or varied 
references we may afterwards make. Persons acting in a 
certain manner, excite in us a feeling of approval ; persons 
acting in a manner opposite to this, cannot be considered 
by us without an emotion perhaps as vivid, or more vivid, 
but of an opposite kind. The difference of our phraseology, 
and of our reference to the action or the agent, from which, 
indeed, that difference of phrase is derived, is founded 
chiefly on the difference of the time at which we consider 
the action as meditated, already performed, or in the act of 
performance. To be virtuous, is to act in this way; to 
have merit, is to have acted in this way ; to feel the moral 
obligation or duty, is merely to think of the action and its 
consequences. We imagine in these cases a difference of 
time, as present, in the virtue of performing it — past, in 
the merit of having performed it — future, in the obligation 
to perform it ; but we imagine no other difference. 

Why does it seem to us virtue to act in this way ? Why 
does he seem to us to have merit, or, in other words, to be 
worthy of our approbation, who has acted in this way ? 
Why have we a feeling of obligation, or duty, when we 
think of acting in this way ? The only answer which we 
can give to these questions is the same to all, that it is im- 
possible for us to consider the action, without feeling that, 
by acting in this way, we should look upon ourselves, and 
others would look on us, with approving regard ; and that if we 
were to act in a different way, we should look upon ourselves, 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



7 



and others would look upon us, with abhorrence, or at least 
with disapprobation. It is indeed easy to go, perhaps, a 
single step or two back, and to say that we approve of the 
action as meritorious, because it is an action which tends to 
the good of the world, or because it is the inferred will of 
Heaven that we should act in a certain manner ; but it is 
very obvious that an answer of this kind does nothing more 
than go back a single step or two, where the same questions 
press with equal force. Why is it virtue, obligation, merit, 
to do that which is for the good of the world, or which 
Heaven seems to us to indicate as fit to be done ? We 
have here the same answer, and only the same answer, to 
give, as in the former case, when we had not gone back 
this step. It appears to us virtue, obligation, merit, because 
the very contemplation of the action excites in us a certain 
feeling of vivid approval. It is this irresistible appro vable- 
ness, if I may use such a word, to express briefly the rela- 
tion of certain actions to the emotion that is instantly ex- 
cited by them, which constitutes to us, who consider the 
action, the virtue of the action itself, the merit of him who 
performed it, the moral obligation on him to have performed 
it. There is one emotion, and it seems to us more than 
one, only because we make certain abstractions of times 
and circumstances from the agent himself, and apply every 
thing which is involved in our present emotion to these 
abstractions which we have made ; to the action, as some- 
thing distinct from the agent, and involving, therefore, a 
sort of virtue separate from his personal merit ; to his own 
conception of the action before performing it, as something 
equally distinct from himself, and involving in it the notion 
of moral obligation as prior to the action. 

If we had not been capable of making such abstractions, 
the action must have been to us only the agent himself, and 
the virtue of the action and the virtue of the agent been, 
therefore, precisely the same. But we are capable of mak- 
ing the abstraction, of considering the good or evil deed, 



8 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



not as performed by one individual, in certain circumstances 
peculiar to him, but as performed by various individuals in 
every possible variety of circumstances. The same action, 
therefore, — if that can truly be called the same action which 
is performed, perhaps, with very different views in different 
circumstances, — is, as we might naturally have supposed, 
capable of exciting in us different emotions, according to 
this difference of supposed views, or of the circumstances in 
which those views are supposed to have been formed. It 
may excite our approval in one case ; or in another case be 
so indifferent as to excite no emotion whatever ; and in 
another case may excite in us the most vivid disapproba- 
tion. The mere fact, however, of this difference of our 
approbation or disapprobation, when we consider the cir- 
cumstances in which an action is performed to have been 
different, is evidently not indicative in itself of any thing 
arbitrary in the principle of our constitution, on which our 
emotions of moral approbation or disapprobation depend ; 
by which an action, the same in all its circumstances, is 
approved by us and condemned ; since it is truly not the 
same action which we are considering, when we thus ap- 
prove, in one set of circumstances, of an action, of which 
we perhaps disapprove when we imagine it performed in 
different circumstances. The action is nothing, but as it is 
the agent himself, having certain feelings, placed in certain 
circumstances, producing certain changes. The agent whom 
we have imagined, when the emotion which we feel is dif- 
ferent, is one whom we have supposed to have different 
views, or to be placed in different circumstances ; and 
though the mere changes, or beneficial or injurious effects 
produced in both cases, which seem to our eyes to constitute 
the action, may be the same in both cases, all that is moral 
in the action, the frame of mind of the agent himself, is as 
truly different as if the visible action, in the mere changes 
or effects produced, had itself been absolutely different. 
The miser, whose sordid parsimony we scorn, exhibits, in his 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



9 



whole life, at least as much mortification of sensual appetite 
as the most abstemious hermit, whose voluntary penance 
we pity and almost respect ; the coward, when it is im- 
possible to fly, w T ill often perform actions which would do 
honour to the most fearless gallantry ; the seeming patriot, 
who, even in the pure ranks of those generous guardians of 
the public who sincerely defend the freedom and happiness 
of the land which they love, is a patriot perhaps most un- 
willingly, because he has no other prospect of sharing that 
public corruption at which he rails, will still expose the cor- 
ruption with as much ardour as if he truly thought the pre- 
servation of the liberty of his country a more desirable 
thing than an office in the Treasury ; and he who, being 
already a placeman, has of course a memory and a fancy 
that suggest to him very different topics of eloquence, will 
describe the happiness of that land over the interests of 
which he presides, with nearly the same zeal of oratory, 
whether he truly at heart take pleasure in the prospect 
• which he pictures, or think the comforts of his own high 
station by far the most important part of that general hap- 
piness which is his favourite and delightful theme. If we 
were to watch minutely the external actions of a very 
skilful hypocrite for half a day, it is possible that we might 
not discover one in which the secret passion within burst 
through its disguise ; yet, if we had reason before to regard 
him as a hypocrite, the very closeness of the resemblance of 
his actions, in every external circumstance, to those of 
virtue, would only excite still more our indignation. They 
excite these different feelings, however, as I have before 
said, because the actions in truth are not the same ; the 
action, in its moral aspect, being only the mind impressed 
with certain views, forming certain preferences, and thus 
willing and producing certain changes ; and the mind, in 
all the cases of apparent similarity to which I have now 
alluded, having internal views as different as the external 
appearances were similar. 

B 2 



10 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



Obvious as the remark may seem, that an action cannot 
be any thing distinct from the agent, more than beauty 
from some object that is beautiful, and that when we speak 
of an action, therefore, as virtuous, without regard to the 
merit of the particular agent, we only conceive some other 
a^ent acting in different circumstances, and exciting in us 
consequently a different feeling of approbation, by the 
difference of the frame of mind which we suppose ourselves 
to contemplate : it strangely happens that little attention 
has been paid to this obvious distinction, that the action 
lias been considered as something separately existing, and 
that we suppose, accordingly, that two feelings are excited 
in us immediately by the contemplation of an action ; a 
feeling of right or wrong in the action, and of virtue or 
vice, merit or demerit, in the agent, which may correspond, 
indeed, but which may not always be the same ; as if the 
agent could be virtuous, and the action wrong, or the action 
right, and he not meritorious, but positively guilty. In 
this way, a sort of confusion and apparent contradiction 
have seemed to exist in the science of morals, which a 
clearer view of the agent and the action as one would have 
prevented, and the apparent confusion and contradiction, 
where none truly exists, have been supposed to justify in 
part, or at least have led in some degree to conclusions as 
false in principle, as dangerous in their practical tendency. 

No voluntary act, intentionally productive of benefit or 
injury, can, as it appears to me, excite directly any such 
opposite sentiments of right in the action and demerit in 
the agent, or wrong in the action and merit, in the agent. 
We take into account, in every case, the whole circum- 
stances of the individual ; and his action in these circum- 
stances is indifferent to us, or it excites an emotion of 
approbation or disapprobation more or less vivid. The 
agent, and the circumstances in which he is placed, the 
agent, and the changes which he intentionally produces, 
these are all which truly constitute the action; and the 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



11 



action, thus compounded of all these circumstances, seems 
to us right if we approve of it, wrong if the emotion, which 
constitutes moral disapprobation, arise when we consider it. 

We may, however, as in the instances which I have 
already used, after approving or disapproving a particular 
action, consider some other individual of different habits 
aud different views, or in circumstances in some other re- 
spects different, performing a similar action, that is to say, 
producing a similar amount of benefit or injury, in the same 
way as, after having seen a green hill, we can imagine a 
hill yellow or black exactly of the same figure ; and it is 
as little wonderful, that the new combination of moral cir- 
cumstances should excite in us a new emotion, as that a 
yellow or black hill should seem to us less or more beauti- 
ful than a green one. Though virtue, as different from 
the virtuous agent, is a mere abstraction, like greenness, 
yellowness, blackness, as different from objects that are 
green, yellow, black, it is still an abstraction which we are 
capable of making ; and, having made it in any particular 
case, we can conceive multitudes to exist with different 
views in the situation in which the single individual existed 
whose action we have considered as virtuous. The action, 
even though in its effects it may be precisely the same, will 
then, perhaps, excite in us very different feelings. It may 
seem to us worthy of blame rather than of praise, or scarcely 
worthy of praise at all, or worthy of still higher admiration; 
but the difference arises from the change of circumstances 
supposed, not from any necessary difference in the principle 
of our moral judgments. In this way, by imagining some 
other agent with different views, or in different circum- 
stances, and in this way only, I conceive, we learn to con- 
sider actions separately from the particular agent, and to 
regard the morality of the one as distinct from the merit of 
the other ; when, in truth, the action which we choose to 
denominate the same, is, as a moral object, completely 
different. 



12 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



If we were present when any one, unacquainted with the 
nature of the different lenses of the optician, looked at any 
small animal through a magnifier, or a multiplier, in a piece 
of plane coloured glass, we should never think of blaming 
his sense of vision as imperfect, though he were seriously to 
believe that the animal at which he looked was much larger 
than it is, or was not one merely, but fifty, or was blue, not 
white. If, however, we were to conceive others, or the 
same individual himself, to look at the same object without 
the medium interposed, and to form the same opinion, we 
should then unquestionably ascribe to their vision what we 
before ascribed to the mere lens interposed ; and, if we con- 
ceived our own sight to be perfect, we could not but con- 
ceive theirs to be imperfect. It is precisely the same in that 
distinction of the virtue of an action and the virtue of the 
agent, which has produced so much confusion in the theory 
of morals. We conceive, in the one case, the moral vision 
of the agent with the lens interposed, in the other case 
without the lens ; and we make in the one case an allow- 
ance which we cannot make in the other. But still I must 
repeat, that in making this very allowance, it is only on 
account of the difference of circumstances that we make it, 
and that we cannot justly extend the difference from the 
mere medium to the living principle on which moral vision 
depends. 

When we speak of an action, then, as virtuous, we speak 
of it as separated from all those accidental intermixtures of 
circumstances which may cloud the discrimination of an 
individual ; when we speak of a person as virtuous, we 
speak of him as acting perhaps under the influence of such 
accidental circumstances ; and though his action, considered 
as an action which might have been performed by any one 
under the influence of other circumstances, may excite our 
moral disapprobation in a very high degree, our disapproba- 
tion is not extended to him. The emotion which he excites 
is pity, not any modification of dislike. We wish that he 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



13 



had been better informed ; and when his general conduct 
has impressed us favourably, we feel perfect confidence that, 
in the present instance also, if he had been better informed, 
he would have acted otherwise. 

In reducing all the various conceptions, or at least the 
conceptions which are supposed to be various, of duty, vir- 
tue, obligation, merit, to this one feeling which arises on 
the contemplation of certain actions ; a feeling which I am 
obliged to term moral approbation or disapprobation, because 
there is no other word in use to denote it, though I am aware 
that approbation and disapprobation, which seem words of 
judgment rather than of emotion, are not terms sufficiently 
vivid to suit the force and liveliness of the sentiment which 
I wish to express ; I flatter myself that I have in some 
degree freed this most interesting subject from much super- 
fluous argumentation. Why do we consider certain actions 
as morally right ; certain actions as morally wrong ? why 
do we consider ourselves as morally bound to perform cer- 
tain actions, to abstain from certain other actions ? why do 
we feel moral approbation of those who perform certain 
actions, moral disapprobation of those who perform certain 
other actions \ For an answer to all these, I would refer 
to the simple emotion, as that on which alone the moral 
distinction is founded. The very conceptions of the recti- 
tude, the obligation, the appro vableness, are involved in 
the feeling of the approbation itself. It is impossible for 
us to have the feeling, and not to have these ; or, to speak 
still more precisely, these conceptions are only the feeling 
itself variously referred in its relation to the person and the 
circumstance. To know that we should feel ourselves un- 
worthy of self-esteem, and objects rather of self-abhorrence, 
if we did not act in a certain manner, is to feel the moral 
obligation to act in a certain manner, as it is to feel the 
moral rectitude of the action itself. We are so constituted, 
that it is impossible for us, in certain circumstances, not to 
have this feeling : and, having the feeling, we must have 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



the notions of virtue, obligation, merit. It is vain for us 
to inquire why we are so constituted, as to rejoice at any 
prosperous event, or to grieve at any calamity ; or why we 
cannot perceive any change without believing that in future 
the same antecedent circumstances will be followed by the 
same consequents. I may remark, too, that, as in the case 
now mentioned, it is impossible for us to have the belief of 
the similarity of the future to the past, simple as this belief 
may seem to be, without having at the same time the con- 
ceptions of cause, effect, power ; so, in the case of moral 
approbation and disapprobation, it is impossible for us to 
have these feelings, however simple they may at first appear, 
without the conception of duty, obligation, virtue, merit, 
which are involved in the distinctive moral feeling, but do 
not produce it, — as our notions of power, cause, effect, are 
involved in our belief of the similarity of the future to the 
past, but are not notions which previously existed, and pro- 
duced the belief ; or, to speak more accurately, these notions 
are not involved in the feeling, which is simple, but are 
rather references made of this one simple feeling to different 
objects. 

When I say, however, that it is vain to inquire why we 
feel the obligation to perform certain actions, I must be 
understood as speaking only of inquiries into the nature of 
the mind itself. Beyond it we may still inquire, and dis- 
cover what we wish to find, not in our own nature, but in 
the nature of that Supreme Benevolence which formed us. 
We do not see, indeed, in the nature of the mind itself, any 
reason that the present should be considered by us as re- 
presentative of the future. We know, however, that if 
man had not been so formed as to believe the future train 
of physical events to resemble the past, it would have been 
impossible for him to exist, because he could not have pro- 
vided what was necessary for preserving his existence, nor 
avoided the dangers which would then, as now, have hung 
over him at every step ; and knowing the necessity of this 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



15 



belief to our very existence, we cannot think of hini who 
formed us to exist, without discovering, in his provident good- 
ness, the reason of the belief itself. But if the existence of 
man would have been brief and precarious, without this 
faith in the similarity of the future, it would not have been 
so wretched as if the mind had not been rendered suscepti- 
ble of the feelings which we have now been considering, the 
feelings of approbation and disapprobation, and the notions 
and affections that originate in these. I shall not attempt 
to picture to you this wretchedness — the wretchedness of a 
world in which such feelings were not a part of the mental 
constitution — a world without virtue, without love of man 
or love of God ; in which, wherever a human being met a 
human being, he met him as a robber, or a murderer, living 
only to fear and to destroy, and dying, to leave on the earth 
a carcass still less loathsome in all its loathsomeness than 
the living form which had been animated but with guilt. 
Our only comfort in considering such a dreadful society is, 
that it could not long subsist, and that the earth must soon 
have been freed from the misery which disgraced it. 

We know, then, in this sense, why our mind has been so 
constituted as to have these emotions ; and our inquiry leads 
us, as all other inquiries ultimately lead us, to the provident 
goodness of him by whom we were made. God, the author 
of all our enjoyments, has willed us to be moral beings ; for 
he could not will us to be happy, in the noblest sense of 
that term, without rendering us capable of practising and 
admiring virtue. 



16 OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



LECTURE II. 

RECAPITULATION. — APPARENT EXCEPTIONS TO THE DOCTRINES OF THE 
PRECEDING LECTURE. — SOPHISTRY OF CONTENDING THAT MORAL 
DISTINCTIONS ARE ACCIDENTAL. — WHEN THE MIND IS INCAPABLE OP 
PERCEIVING MORAL DISTINCTIONS. — EFFECTS OF PASSION, COM- 
PLEXITY ; AND THE MISLEADING INFLUENCE OF ASSOCIATION. 

The object of my last Lecture was to make you ac- 
quainted with the nature and source of our notions of moral 
excellence and moral delinquency, the primary moral notions 
to which, as the directors of conduct, every ethical inquiry 
must relate. 

In this elucidation of a subject, the most interesting of 
all the subjects which can come under our review, since it 
comprehends all that is admired and loved by us in man, 
and all that is loved by us and adored in God, I endeavoured 
to free the inquiry, as much as possible, from every thing 
which might encumber it, particularly to explain to you the 
real meaning of some distinctions, which, as commonly 
misunderstood, have led to much superfluous disputation 
on the theory of virtue, and partly in consequence of the 
inconsistencies and confusion which they seem to involve, 
have had the still more unfortunate effect of leading some 
minds to disbelief or doubt of the essential distinctions of 
morality itself. 

The most important of these misconceptions relate to our 
notions of virtue, obligation, merit ; for the origin of which, 
writers on ethics are accustomed to have recourse to different 
feelings, and different sources of feeling, but which, I en- 
deavoured to show you, have all their origin in one emotion, 
or vivid sentiment of the mind, that vivid sentiment which 
is the immediate result of the contemplation of certain 
actions, and to which we give the name of moral approba- 
tion. An action, though we often speak of it abstractly, 
is not, and cannot be, any thing which exists independently 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



17 



of the agent. It is some agent, therefore, real or supposed, 
whom we contemplate when this sentiment of approbation 
in any XJase arises ; an agent placed, or imagined to be 
placed, in certain circumstances, having certain views, 
willing and producing certain effects of benefit or injury. 
What the agent is, as an object of our approbation or dis- 
approbation, that his action is ; for his action is himself 
acting. We say, indeed, in some cases, that an action is 
wrong, without any loss of virtue on the part of the agent 
in the peculiar circumstances in which he may have been 
placed ; that it is absolutely wrong, relatively right ; but 
in this case the action of which we speak as right and wrong 
in different circumstances, is truly, as I showed you, in 
these different circumstances, a different action ; that is to say, 
we consider a different agent, acting with different views ; 
in which case it is as absurd to term the moral action — that 
which excites our approbation or disapprobation — the same, 
as it would be to term a virtuous sovereign and his tyran- 
nical successor the same, because they have both been seated 
on the same throne, and worn the same robes and diadem. 
One individual putting another individual to death, excites 
in us abhorrence, if we think of the murderer and the mur- 
dered as friends, or even as indifferent strangers. But we 
say, that the same action of putting to death implies rela- 
tively nothing immoral, if the individual slain were a robber 
entering our dwelling at midnight, or an enemy invading 
our country. It surely, however, requires no very subtile 
discernment to perceive, that the murderer of the friend, 
and the destoyer of the foe, being agents, acting with dif- 
ferent views, in different circumstances, their actions, which 
are only brief expressions of themselves, as acting in dif- 
ferent circumstances, are truly different; and, being different, 
may of course be supposed to excite different feelings in him 
who considers them, without any anomaly of moral judg- 
ment. The same action in its only true sense of sameness, 
- — that is to say, the same frame of mind in circumstances 



18 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



precisely similar, — cannot then be relatively right and ab- 
solutely wrong, as if the moral distinction were loose and 
arbitrary. If it be relatively right, it is absolutely right ; 
and what we call the absolute action that is wrong is a 
different action ; an action as different from that which we 
term relatively right, as a morass is different from a green 
meadow, which are both plains ; or a clear rivulet from a 
muddy canal, which are both streams. We do not say that 
a morass, though relatively ugly, is, with all its relative 
ugliness, absolutely beautiful, because it would be beautiful 
in other circumstances, if drained, and covered with ver- 
dure, and blooming with the wild flowers of summer, 
and still gayer with the happy faces of little groups, that 
may perhaps be frolicking in delight, where before all was 
stillness and desolation. Such a meadow is indeed beauti- 
ful ; but to our senses, that judge only of what is before 
them, not of what the immediate object might have been, 
or might still be in other circumstances, such a meadow is 
not a morass ; and as little, or rather far less, is the slaughter 
of half an army of invaders, in one of those awful fields on 
which the liberty or slavery of a people waits on the triumph 
of a single hour, to be classed in the same list of actions with 
the murder of the innocent and the helpless, though with 
complete similarity of result in the death of others. If the 
effect alone could be said to constitute the moral action, 
both terminate equally in the destruction of human life, and 
both imply the intention of destroying. 

An action, then, as capable of being considered by us, is 
not a thing in itself, which may have various relations to 
various agents, but is only another name for some agent of 
whom we think, real or supposed ; and whatever emotion 
an action excites, is therefore necessarily some feeling for 
an agent. The virtue of an action is the virtue of the 
agent, — his merit, his conformity to duty or moral obliga- 
tion. There is, in short, an approvabieness, which is felt 
on considering certain actions ; and our reference of this 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



19 



vivid sentiment to the action that excites it, is all which is 
meant by any of those terms. ^\ r e are not to make sepa- 
rate inquiries into the nature of that principle of the mind 
by which we discover the rectitude of an action, and then 
into the nature of the moral obligation to perform it, and 
then into the merit of the agent; but we have one feeling 
excited in us by the agent acting in a certain manner ; 
which is virtue, moral obligation, merit, according as the 
same action is considered in point of time, when it is the 
subject, before performance, of deliberation and choice, of 
actual performance when chosen, or of memory when 
already performed. It is all which we mean by moral 
obligation, when we think of the agent as feeling previously 
to his action, that if he were not to perform the action, he 
would have to look on himself with disgust, and with the 
certainty that others would look on him with abhorrence. 
It is all which we mean by the virtue of the agent, when 
we consider him acting in conformity with this view. It is 
merit when we consider him to have acted in this way ; the 
term which we use varying, you perceive, in all these cases, 
as the action is regarded by us as present, past, or future, 
and the moral sentiment in all alike, being only that one 
simple vivid feeling, which rises immediately on the con- 
templation of the action. 

The appro vableness of an action, then, to use a barbarous 
but expressive word, is at once all these qualities ; and the 
approvableness is merely the relation which certain actions 
bear to certain feelings that arise in our mind on the con- 
templation of these actions ; feelings that arise to our feeble 
heart with instant warning or direction, as if they were 
the voice of some guardian power within us, that in the 
virtues of others points out what is worthy of our imitation, 
in their vices what we cannot imitate without being un- 
worthy of the glorious endowments of which we are 
conscious ; and unworthy, too, of the love of him who, 
though known to us by his power, is known to us still more 



20 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



as the Highest Goodness, and who, in all the infinite gifts 
which he has lavished on us, has conferred on us no blessing 
so inestimable as the capacity which we enjoy of knowing 
and loving what is good. To say that an action excites in 
us this feeling, and to say that it appears to us right, or 
virtuous, or conformable to duty, are to say precisely the 
same thing ; and an action which does not excite in us this 
feeling, cannot appear to us right, virtuous, conformable to 
duty, any more than an object can be counted by us brilliant, 
which uniformly appears to us obscure, or obscure which 
appears to us uniformly brilliant. To this ultimate fact in 
the constitution of our nature, the principal, or original 
tendency of the mind, by which, in certain circumstances, 
we are susceptible of moral emotions, we must always come 
in estimating virtue, whatever analysis we may make or 
may think that we have made. It is in this respect, as in 
many others, like the kindred emotion of beauty. Our 
feeling of beauty is not the mere perception of forms and 
colours, or the discovery of the uses of certain combinations 
of forms ; it is an emotion arising from these, indeed, but 
distinct from them. Our feeling of moral excellence, in like 
manner, is not the mere perception of different actions, or 
the discovery of the physical good which these may produce ; 
it is an emotion of a very different kind, a light within our 
breast, from which, as from the very effulgence of the 
purest of all truths, 

Is human fortune gladden'd with the rays 
Of Virtue, with the moral colours thrown 
On every walk of this our social scene ; 
Adorning for the eye of gods and men 
The passions, actions, habitudes of life, 
And rendering earth, like heaven, a sacred place, 
Where love and praise may take delight to dwell. 1 
That we do feel this approbation of certain actions, and 
disapprobation of certain other actions, no one denies. But 

1 Pleasures of Imagination, second form of the poem, Book II. 
151-157. 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



21 



the feeling is, by many sophistical moralists, ascribed wholly 
to circumstances that are accidental, without any greater 
original tendency of the mind to feel, in different circum- 
stances of human action, one or other of these emotions. If 
man could be born with every faculty in its highest excel- 
lence, capable of distinguishing all the remote as well as all 
the immediate consequences of actions, but free from the 
prejudices of education, he would, they suppose, look with 
equal moral love, or rather, with uniform and equal in- 
difference of regard, on him who has plunged a dagger in 
the breast of his benefactor, and on him who has risked his 
own life for the preservation of his enemy. There are 
philosophers, and philosophers too who consider themselves 
peculiarly worthy of that name, from the nicety of their 
analysis of all that is complex in action, who can look on 
the millions of millions of mankind, in every climate and 
age, mingling together in a society that subsists only by the 
continued belief of the moral duties of all to all, who can 
mark every where sacrifices made by the generous, to the 
happiness of those whom they love, and every where an 
admiration of such sacrifices, — not the voices of the timid 
and the ignorant oiily mingling in the praise, but warriors, 
statesmen, poets, philosophers, bearing with the peasant and 
the child their united testimonies to the great truth, that 
man is virtuous in promoting the happiness of man : there 
are minds which can see and hear all this, and which can 
turn away, to seek in some savage island, a few indistinct 
murmurs that may seem to be discordant with the whole 
great harmony of mankind ! 

'When an inquirer of this class, after perusing every 
narrative of every nation in every part of the globe, with a 
faith for all that is monstrous in morality, as ready as his 
disbelief of prodigies in physics less marvellous, which the 
same voyagers and travellers relate, has collected his little 
stock of facts, or of reports which are to him as facts, he 
comes forward in the confidence of overthrowing with these 



22 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



the whole system of public morals, as far as that system is 
supposed to be founded on any original moral difference of 
actions. He finds, indeed, every where else parricide looked 
upon with abhorrence ; but he can prove this to be wholly 
accidental, because he has found, on some dismal coast, 
some miserable tribe in which it is customary to put the 
aged to death when very infirm, and in which the son is 
the person who takes upon him this office. For almost 
every virtue which the world acknowledges as indicated to 
us by the very constitution of our social nature, he has, in 
like manner, some little fact which proves the world to be 
in an error. Some of these he finds even in the usages of 
civilized life. What is right on one side of a mountain, is 
wrong on the opposite side of it ; and a river is sometimes 
the boundary of a virtue as much as of an empire. " How, 
then, can there be any fixed principles of morality," he 
says, " when morality itself seems to be incessantly 
fluctuating ?" 

Morality is incessantly fluctuating ; or rather, according 
to this system, there is no morality, at least no natural 
tendency to the distinction of actions as moral or immoral, 
and we have only a few casual prejudices which we have 
chosen to call virtues : prejudices which a slight difference 
of circumstance might have reversed, making the lover of 
mankind odious to us, and giving all our regard to the 
robber and the murderer. We prefer, indeed, at present, 
Aurelius to Caligula ; but a single prejudice more or less, 
or at least a few prejudices additional, might have made 
Caligula the object of universal love, to which his character 
is in itself as well entitled as the character of that philoso- 
phic emperor, who was as much an honour to philosophy as 
to the imperial purple. And in what world is this said ? 
In a world in which Caligula has never had a single 
admirer, in all the multitudes to whom his history has 
become known : a world in which, if we were to consider 
the innumerable actions that are performed in it in any one 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



instant, we should be wearied with counting those which 
furnish evidence of the truth of moral distinctions, by the 
complacency of virtue or the remorse of vice, and the 
general admiration, or disgust and abhorrence, with which 
the virtue, when known to others, is loved, and the vice 
detested, long before we should be able to discover a single 
action that, in the contrariety of general sentiment with 
respect to it, might furnish even one feeble exception. 

Some apparent exceptions, however, it must still be 
allowed, the moral scene does truly exhibit. But are they, 
indeed, proofs of the absolute original indifference of all 
actions to our regard ? Or do they not merely seem to be 
exceptions, because we have not made distinctions and 
limitations which it was necessary to make ? 

It often happens that, by contending for too much in a 
controversy, we fail to establish truths that appear doubtful, 
only because they are mingled with doubtful or false 
propositions, for which we contend as strenuously as for the 
true. This, I think, has taken place, in some degree, in 
the great controversy as to morals. In our zeal for the 
absolute immutability of moral distinctions, we have made 
the argument for original tendencies to moral feeling appear 
less strong by extending it too far; and facts, therefore, 
have seemed to be exceptions which could not have seemed 
to be so, if we had been a little more moderate in our 
universal affirmation. 

Let us consider, then, what the species of accordance is 
for which we may safely contend. 

That virtue is nothing in itself, but is only a general 
name for certain actions, which agree in exciting, when 
contemplated, a certain emotion of the mind, I trust I have 
already sufficiently shown. There is no virtue, no vice, 
but there are virtuous agents, vicious agents ; that is to say, 
persons whose actions we cannot contemplate without a 
certain instant emotion; and what we term the law of 
nature, in its relation to certain actions, is nothing more 



24 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



than the general agreement of this sentiment in relation to 
those actions. In thinking of virtue, therefore, it is evident 
that we are not to look for any thing self-existing, like the 
universal essences of the schools ; and eternal, like the 
Platonic ideas ; but a felt relation, and nothing more. We 
are to consider only agents, and the emotions which these 
agents excite ; and all which we mean by the moral dif- 
ferences of actions, is their tendency to excite one emotion 
rather than another. 

Virtue, then, being a term expressive only of the relation 
of certain actions, as contemplated, to certain emotions in 
the minds of those who contemplate them, cannot, it is 
evident, have any universality beyond that of the minds in 
which these emotions arise. We speak always, therefore, 
relatively to the constitution of our minds, not to what we 
might have been constituted to admire if we had been 
created by a different being, but to what we are constituted 
to admire, and what, in our present circumstances, approv- 
ing or disapproving with instant love or abhorrence, it is 
impossible for us not to believe to be, in like manner, the 
objects of approbation or disapprobation to him who has 
endowed us with feelings so admirably accordant with all 
those gracious purposes which we discover in the economy 
of nature. 

Virtue, however, is still, in strictness of philosophic pre- 
cision, a term expressive only of the relation of certain 
emotions of our mind to certain actions that are contem- 
plated by us : its universality is co-extensive with the 
minds in which the emotions arise ; and this is all which 
we can mean by the essential distinctions of morality, 
even though all mankind were supposed by us, at every 
moment, to feel precisely the same emotions on contemplat- 
ing the same actions. 

But it musk be admitted, also, that all mankind do not 
feel at every moment precisely the same emotions on con- 
templating actions that are precisely the same ; and it is 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



25 



necessary, therefore, to make some limitations even of this 
relative universality. 

In the first place, it must be admitted that there are 
moments in which the mind is wholly incapable of perceiv- 
ing moral differences ; that is to say, in which the emotions 
that constitute the feeling of these moral differences do not 
arise. Such are all the moments of very violent passion. 
When the impetuosity of the passion is abated, indeed, we 
perceive that we have done what we now look upon with 
horror ; but when our passion was most violent, we were 
truly blinded by it, or at least saw only what it permitted 
us to see. The moral emotion has not arisen, because the 
whole soul was occupied with a different species of feeling. 
The moral distinctions, however, or general tendencies of 
actions to excite this emction, are not on this account less 
certain ; or we must say, that the truths of arithmetic, and 
all other truths, are uncertain, since the mind, in a state of 
passion, would be equally incapable of distinguishing these. 
He who has lived for years in the hope of revenge, and 
who has at length laid his foe at his feet, may, indeed, 
while he pulls out his dagger from the heart that is quiver- 
ing beneath it, be incapable of feeling the crime which he 
has committed ; but would he at that moment be abler to 
tell the square of four, or tbe cube of two? All in his 
mind, at that moment, is one wild state of agitation, which 
allows nothing to be felt but the agitation itself. 

" While the human heart is thus agitated," it has been 
said, " by the flux and reflux of a thousand passions, tha 
sometimes unite and sometimes oppose each other, to en- 
grave laws on it, is to engrave them not on sand, but on a 
wave that is never at rest. What eyes are piercing enough 
to read the sacred characters ? " 

" Vain declamation ! " answers the writer from whom I 
quote. " If we do not read the characters, it is not because 
our sight is too weak to discern tbem, it is because we do 

c 



26 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



not fix our eyes on them ; or if they be indistinguishable, it 
is only for a moment." 

" The heart of man," he continues, " may be considered, 
allegorically, as an island almost level with the water which 
bathes it. On the pure white marble of the island are en- 
graved the holy precepts of the law of nature. Near 
these characters is one who bends his eyes respectfully on 
the inscription, and reads it aloud. He is the lover of 
Virtue, the Genius of the island. The water around is in 
continual agitation. The slightest zephyr raises it into 
billows. It then covers the inscription. We no longer see 
the characters. We no longer hear the Genius read. But 
the calm soon rises from the bosom of the storm. The 
island reappears white as before, and the Genius resumes 
his employment.'' 

That passion has a momentary influence in blinding us to 
moral distinctions, or, which is the same thing, an influence' 
to prevent the rise of certain emotions, that, but for the 
stronger feeling of the passion itself, would arise, may then 
be admitted ; but the influence is momentary, or little more 
than momentary, and extends, as we have seen, even to 
those truths which are commonly considered as best en- 
titled to the appellation of universal. The moral truths, it 
must be allowed — if I may apply the name of truths to the 
felt moral differences of actions — are, to the impassioned 
mind, as little universal as the truths of geometry. 

Another still more important limitation of the universality 
for which we contend, relates to actions which are so com- 
plex as to have various opposite results of good and evil, or 
of which it is not easy to trace the consequences. An 
action, when it is the object of our moral approbation or 
disapprobation, is, as I have already said, the agent himself 
acting with certain views. These views, that is to say, the 
intentions of the agent, are necessary to be taken into 
account, or, rather, are the great moral circumstances to be 
considered ; and the intention is not visible to us like the 



OF OUR. NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



27 



external changes produced by it, but is, in many cases, to 
be inferred from the apparent results. When these results, 
therefore, are too obscure or too complicated to furnish 
clear and immediate evidence of the intention, we may 
pause in estimating actions which we should not fail to 
have approved instantly, or disapproved instantly, if we 
had known the intention of the agent, or could have in- 
ferred it more easily from a simpler result; or, by fixing 
our attention chiefly on one part of the complex result, that 
was perhaps not the part which the agent had in view, we 
may condemn what was praiseworthy, or applaud what 
deserved our condemnation. If the same individual may 
thus have different moral sentiments, according to the dif- 
ferent parts of the complex result on which his attention 
may have been fixed, it is surely not wonderful that dif- 
ferent individuals, in regarding the same action, should 
sometimes approve in like manner, and disapprove variously, 
not because the principle of moral emotion, as an original 
tendency of the mind, is absolutely capricious, but because 
the action considered, though apparently the same, is really 
different as an object of conception in different minds, accord- 
ing to the parts of the mixed result which attract the chief 
attention. 

Such partial views, it is evident, may become the views 
of a whole nation, from the peculiar circumstances in which 
the nation may be placed as to other nations, or from pecu- 
liarity of general institutions. The legal permission of 
theft in Sparta, for example, may seem to us, with our 
pacific habits, and security of police, an exception to that 
moral principle of disapprobation for which I contend. 
But there can be no doubt that theft, as mere theft, — or, 
in other words, as a mere production of a certain quantity 
of evil by one individual to another individual, — if it never 
had been considered in relation to any political object, 
would in Sparta also have excited disapprobation as with 
us. As a mode of inuring to habits of vigilance a warlike 



28 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



people, however, it might be considered in a very different 
light ; the evil of the loss of property, though in itself an 
evil to the individual, even in a country in which differences 
of property were so slight, being nothing in this estimate 
when compared with the more important national accession 
of military virtue ; and, indeed, the reason of the permis- 
sion seems to be sufficiently marked, in the limitation of the 
impunity to cases in which the aggressor escaped detection 
at the time. The law of nature, the law written in the 
heart of man, then came again into all its authority ; or 
rather, the law of nature had not ceased to have authority, 
even in those permissions which seemed to be directly 
opposed to it; the great object, even of those anomalous 
permissions, being the happiness of the state, the pursuit of 
which nature points out to our approbation in the same 
manner, though not with such vivid feelings, as she points 
out to us for approbation the endeavour to render more 
happy the individuals around us. It would be a very inte- 
resting inquiry to consider, in this way, all those instances 
which have been adduced as exceptions to natural law, and 
to detect the circumstances of real or supposed good accom- 
panying the evil permitted, for which the evil itself might 
in many cases seem to have been permitted ; or which, at 
least, lessened so much the result of evil, in the eyes of 
those who considered it in the particular circumstances of 
the age and country, that a very slight temptation might 
overcome the disapprobation of it, — as we find at present 
in our civilized society, many evils tolerated, not because 
they are not considered to be evil, but because the evil 
seems so slight as not to imply any gross disregard of 
morality. This minute analysis of the instances alleged, 
however, though it might not be difficult to discover in 
every case some form of good, which, in the mixed result 
of good and evil, was present to the approver's mind, my 
limits will not allow me to extend ; but there is one general 
remark which may in some measure supply the place of 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



29 



more minute discussion, since it may almost be said to 
convert these very instances into proofs of that general 
accordance of moral sentiment, in disproof of which they 
are adduced. 

When these supposed exceptions are tolerated, why is it 
that they are tolerated ? Is it on account of the benefit 
or of the injury that co-exist in one complex mixture? Is 
it said, for example, by the ancient defenders of suicide, 
that it is to be commended because it deprives mankind 
of the further aid of one who might still be useful to 
society, or because it will give sorrow to every relation and 
friend, or because it is a desertion of the charge which 
Heaven has assigned to us ? It is for reasons very dif- 
ferent that it is said by them to be allowable ; because the 
circumstances, they say, are such as seem of themselves to 
point out that the Divine Being has no longer occasion for 
our service on earth, and because our longer life would be 
only still greater grief or disgrace to our friends, and a 
burden rather than an aid to society. "When the usages of 
a country allow the exposure of infants, is it not still for 
some reason of advantage to the community, falsely sup- 
posed to require it, that the permission is given ? Or is it 
for the mere pleasure of depriving the individual infant of 
life, and of adding a few more sufferings to the general 
sufferings of humanity? Where is the land that says, 
Let misery be produced or increased, because it is 
misery ? Let the production of happiness to an indivi- 
dual be avoided, because it is happiness ? Then, indeed, 
might the distinctions of morality in the emotions which 
attend the production of good and evil, be allowed to 
be wholly accidental. But if nature has every where 
made the production of good desirable for itself, and the 
production of evil desirable, when it is desired and approved, 
only because it is accompanied, or supposed to be accom- 
panied, with good, the very desire of the compound of 
good and evil, on this account, is itself a proof, not of love 



30 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



of evil, but of love of good. It is pleasiDg thus to find 
nature in the wildest excesses of savage ignorance, and in 
those abuses to which the imperfect knowledge even of 
civilized nations sometime.- _ •■ - ; . - . 
it were, her own excellence. — in the midst of vice and 
misery asserting still those sacred principles which are the 
virtue and the happiness of nations. — principles of - 
that very misery and vice attest the power, whether in the 
errors of multitudes who. have sought evil for some sup- 
posed good, or in the guilt of individuals, who, in 
abandoning virtue, still offer to it an allegiance which it 
is impossible for them to withhold in the homage of their 
remorse. 

It never must be forgotten, in estimating the moral 
impression which actions produce, that an action is nothiDg 
in itself; that all which we truly consider in it is the agent 
placed in certain circumstances, feeling certain desires, 
willing certain changes : and that our approbation and dis- 
approbation may therefore vary, without any fickleness on 
our part, merely in consequence of the different views which 
we form of the intention of the agent. In every compli- 
cated case, therefore, i: is -. . - m v nderfal that 
different individuals should mcUre differentlv. that it would 
indeed be truly . n 1-.:: h i: they should j □ ire alike: since 
it would imply a far nicer measurement than any of which 
we aie capable, ci the mixed gc •; :1 an a evil - : :he con: pi ex 
results of human action, and a power of discerning what is 
secretly passing in the heart, which man does not possess, 
and which it is not easy for us t? sui ian. in any cir- 

cumstances, capable of possessing. 

In complicated case.-, then, we may approve differently, 
because we are in truth incapable of distinguishing all the 
moral elements of the action, and may tlx oar attention on 
some of these, to the exclusion of others. Our taste, in like 
manner, distinguishes what is sweet and what is bitter, 
when these are simply presented to us ; and there are 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



31 



substances which are no sooner put in the little mouth of 
the infant than he seems to feel from them pleasure or pain. 
He distinguishes the sweet from the bitter, as he distin- 
guishes them in after life. Who is there who denies that 
there is, in the original sensibility of the infant, a tendency 
to certain preferences of this kind ; that there are sub- 
stances which are naturally agreeable to the taste, substances 
which are naturally disagreeable, and that it requires no 
process of education, no labour of years, no addition of 
prejudice after prejudice, to make sugar an object of desire 
to the child, and wormwood of disgust ? Yet in the 
luxury of other years, there are culinary preparations which 
the taste of some approves, while the taste of others rejects 
them ; and in all of which it is difficult to distinguish the 
prevailing element, whether acid, austere, sweet, bitter, 
aromatic. If the morals of nations differed half as much as 
the cookery of different nations, we might allow some cause 
for disbelief of all the natural distinctions of right and 
wrong. But what sceptic is there who contends, from the 
approbation which one nation gives to a sauce or a ragout, 
which almost sickens him, that the sweet does not naturally 
differ from the bitter, as more agreeable, the aromatic from 
the insipid ; and that, to the infant, sugar, wormwood, 
spice, are, as sources of pleasure, essentially the same ? 

We approve of what we know, or suppose ourselves to 
know, and we approve according as we know or suppose, 
not according to circumstances which truly exist, but 
which exist unobserved by us and unsuspected. It is not 
contended that we come into the world with a knowledge 
of certain actions, which we are afterwards to approve or 
disapprove, for we enter into the world ignorant of every 
thing which is to happen in it ; but that we come into 
existence with certain susceptibilities of emotion, in conse- 
quence of which it will be impossible for us, in after life, 
but for the influence of counteracting circumstances, 
momentary or permanent, not to be pleased with the con- 



32 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



templation of certain actions, as soon as they have become 
fully known to us, and not to have feelings of disgust on 
the contemplation of certain other actions. I am astonished, 
therefore, that Paley, in stating the objection, " that if we 
be prompted by nature to the approbation of particular 
actions, we must have received also from nature a distinct 
conception of the action we are thus prompted to approve, 
which we certainly have not received," should have stated 
this as an objection, to which " it is difficult to find an 
answer," since there is no objection to which the answer is 
more obvious. There is not a single feeling of the mind, 
however universal, to the existence of which precisely the 
same objection might not be opposed. There is no part of 
the world, for example, in which the proportions of number 
and quantity are not felt to be the same. Four are to 
twenty as twenty to a hundred, wherever those numbers 
are distinctly conceived ; but though we come into the 
world capable of feeling the truth of this proportion, when 
the numbers themselves shall have been previously conceived 
by us, no one surely contends that it is necessary, for this 
capacity, that we should come into the world with an 
accurate knowledge of the particular numbers. The mind 
is, by its original constitution, capable of feeling all the 
sensations of colour, when different varieties of light are 
presented to the eye ; and it has this original constitution, 
without having the actual sensations which are to arise 
only in certain circumstances that are necessary for pro- 
ducing them, and which may never, therefore, be states of 
the mind, if the external organ of vision be imperfect. 
Even the boldest denier of every original distinction of vice 
and virtue must still allow, that we do at present look 
with approbation on certain actions, with disapprobation on 
other actions ; and that, having these feelings, we must, by 
our original constitution, have been capable of the feelings ; 
so that, if the mere capacity were to imply the existing 
notions of the actions that are to be approved or disapproved; 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



S3 



he would be obliged, if this objection had any weight, to 
allow that, on his own principles, we must equally have 
innate notions of right and wrong, which we have not, or 
that we feel certain emotions which we yet had no capacity 
of feeling. But on an objection which appears to me so 
very obviously futile, it is idle to dwell so long. 

We have made, then, two limitations of that universality 
and absolute uniformity of moral sentiment for which some 
ethical writers have too strongly contended ; in the first 
place, when the mind is, as it were, completely occupied, 
or hurried away by the violence of extreme passion ; and, 
in the second place, when the action which we consider is 
not the simple intentional production of good as good, or of 
evil as evil, in certain definite circumstances, but when the 
result that has been willed is a mixture of good and evil, 
which it is difficult to discriminate, and in which the good 
may occur to some minds more readily, the evil to other 
minds ; or in different stages of society, or different circum- 
stances of external or internal situation, the good may be 
more or less important, and the evil more or less important, 
so as to have a higher relative interest than it otherwise 
would have possessed. 

To these two limitations it is necessary to add a third, 
that operates very powerfully and widely on our moral 
estimates, — the influence of the principle of association. 
We are not to suppose, that because man is formed with 
the capacity of certain moral emotions, he is therefore to be 
exempt from the influence of every other principle of his 
constitution. The influence of association, indeed, does not 
destroy his moral capacity, but it gives it new objects, or 
at least varies the objects in which it is to exercise itself, 
by suggesting with peculiar vividness certain accessory 
circumstances, which may variously modify the general 
sentiment that results from the contemplation of particular 
actions. 

One very extensive form of the influence of association 

c 2 



S4- OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 

on our moral sentiment?, is that which consists in the appli- 
cation to particular cases of feelings that belong to a class. 
In nature there are no classes : there are only particular 
actions, more or less beneficial or injurious. But we cannot 
consider these particular action: Lug. withont discovering 
in them, as in any other number of objects that may be 
considered by us at the same time, certain relations of 
analogy or resemblance of some sort, in consequence of 
which we class them together, and form for the whole class 
one comprehensive name. Such are the generic words 
justice, injustice, malevolence, benevolence. To these 
generic words, which, if distinguished from the number of 
separate actions denoted by them, are mere words, invented 
by ourselves, we gradually, from the influence of associa- 
tion in the feelings that have attended the particular cases 
to which the same name has been applied, attach one mixed 
notion, a sort of compound, or modified whole, of the various 
feelings which the actions separately would have excited. — 
more vivid, therefore, than what would have arisen on the 
contemplation of some of these actions, — less vivid than 
what others might have excited. It is enough that an 
action is one of a class which we term unjust : we feel 
instantly not the mere emotion which the action of itself 
would originally have excited, but we feel also that emotion 
which has been associated with the class of actions to which 
the particular action belongs : and though the action may 
be of a kind which, if we had formed no general arrange- 
ment, would have excited but slight emotion, as implying 
no very great injury produced or intended, it thus excites 
afar more vivid feeling, by borrowing, as it- were, from 
other analogous and more atrocious actions, that are com- 
prehended under the same general term, the feeling which 
they vrould originally have excited. It is quite evident, 
for example, that in a civilized country, in which property 
is largely possessed, and complicated in its tenure, and as 
in the various modes in which it may be transferred, the 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



35 



infringement of property must be an object of peculiar 
importance, and what is commonly termed justice, in regard 
to it, be a virtue of essential value, and injustice a crime 
against which it is necessary to prepare many checks, and 
which is thence regarded as of no slight delinquency. The 
offence of the transgressor is estimated, in such a case, not 
by the little evil which, in any particular case, he may 
intentionally have occasioned to another individual, but in 
a great degree also by the amount of evil which would arise 
in a system of society constituted as that of the great 
nations of Europe is constituted, if all men were to be equally 
regardless of the right of property in others. When we 
read, therefore, of the tendency to theft, in many barbarous 
islanders of whom navigators tell us, and of the very little 
shame which they seemed to feel on detection of their petty 
larcenies, we carry along with us our own classes of actions, 
and the emotions to which our own general rules, resulting 
from our own complicated social state, have given rise. 
We forget, that to those who consider an action simply as 
it is, the guilt of an action is an object that is measured 
by the mere amount of evil intentionally produced in the 
particular case ; and that the theft which they contemplate 
is not, therefore, in its moral aspect, the same offence that 
is contemplated by us. I need not trace out, in other cases, 
the influence of general rules, which you must be able to 
trace with sufficient precision for yourselves. 

Such, then, is one of the modes in which association 
operates. Bat it is not in general rules alone that the 
influence of the associating principle is to be traced. It 
extends in some degree to all our moral feelings. There is 
no education, indeed, which can make the pure benevolence 
of others hateful to us, unless by that very feeling of our 
own inferiority which implies in envy itself our reverence, 
and consequently our moral approbation, of what we hate ; 
no education which can make pure deliberate malice in 
others an object of our esteem. But if there be any 



36 OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 

circumstances accompanying the benevolence and malice, 
which tend to the disparagement of the one and the eleva- 
tion of the other, the influence of association may be excited 
powerfully, in this way, by fixing our attention more 
vividly on these slight accompanying circumstances. The 
fearlessness which often attends vice, may be raised into an 
importance beyond its merit, in savage ages, in which fear- 
lessness is more important for the security of the state, and 
in which power and glory seem to wait on it : the yielding 
gentleness of benevolence may, in such circumstances, appear 
timidity, or at least a degree of softness unworthy of the 
perfect man. In like manner, when a vice is the vice of 
those whom we love, — of a friend, a brother, a parent, — 
the influence of association may lessen and overcome our 
moral disapprobation, not by rendering the vice in itself an 
object of our esteem, but by rendering it impossible for us 
to feel a vivid disapprobation of those whom we love, and 
mingliug, therefore, some portion of this very regard in our 
contemplation of all their actions. It is because we have 
the virtue of loving our benefactor, or friend, or parent, 
that we seem not to feel in so a lively a manner the 
un worthiness of that vice which is partly lost to our notice, 
in the general emotion of our gratitude. But when we 
strip away these illusions, or when the vice is pure inten- 
tional malice, which no circumstance of association can 
embellish, it is equally impossible for us to look upon it 
with esteem, as it is impossible for us to turn away with 
loathing from him whose whole existence seems to be 
devoted to the happiness of others, and to rejoice, as we 
look upon him, that we are not what he is. 

Ite ipsi in vestra^ penetralia mentis et intus 
Incisos apices, et scripta volumina mentis 
Inspicite, et genitam vofeiscum agnoscite legem. 
Quis vitiis adeo stolide obleetatur apertis, 
Ut quod agit velit ipsi pati ? Mendacia fallax, 
Furta rapax, furiosum atrox, homicida omentum 
Damnat, et in moechnm gladios distringit adulter. 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



Ergo oinnes una in vita cum lege creati 
Venimus, et fibris geriraus quae condita libris. 

I have made these limitations, because it appears to me 
that much confusion on the subject of morals has arisen 
from inattention to these, and from the two great claims 
which have sometimes been made by the assertors of what 
they have termed immutable morality. The influence of 
temporary passion, — of the complication of good with evil, 
and of evil with good, in one mixed result, — and of general 
or individual associations, that mingle with these complex 
results some new elements of remembered pain or pleasure, 
dislike or regard, it seems to me absurd to attempt to deny. 
But, admitting these indisputable influences, it seems to me 
equally unreasonable not to admit the existence of that 
original susceptibility of moral emotion which precedes the 
momentary passion, and outlasts it ; which, in admiring the 
complex result of good and evil, admires always some form 
of good, and which is itself the source of the chief delights 
or sorrows which the associations of memory furnish as 
additional elements in our moral estimate. 



LECTURE III. 

RETROSPECT OF LAST LECTURE. — THE PRIMARY DISTINCTIONS OF 
MORALITY IMPLANTED IN EVERY HUMAN HEART, AND NEVER 
COMPLETELY EFFACED. 

Having traced in a former Lecture, our notions of 
virtue, obligation, merit, to one simple feeling of the 
mind, — a feeling of vivid approval of the frame of mind 
of the agent, which arises on the contemplation of certain 
actions, and the capacity of which is as truly essential to 
our mental constitution, as the capacity of sensation, 
memory, reason, or of any of the other feelings of which 



ss 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



our mind is susceptible, I considered in my last Lecture, 
the arguments in opposition to this principle, as an 
original tendency of the mind, drawn from some apparent 
irregularities of moral sentiment in different ages and 
countries. 

For determining the force of such instances, however, as 
objections to the original distinctions of morality, it was 
necessary to consider precisely what is meant by that 
general accordance of moral sentiment, which the world 
may be considered as truly exhibiting. It is only by 
contending for more than the precise truth, that, in many 
instances, we furnish its opponents with the little triumphs 
which seem to them like perfect victory. TVe give to the 
truth itself an appearance of doubtfulness, because we have 
combined it with what is doubtful, or perhaps altogether 
false. 

In the first place, the language which the assertors of 
virtue are in the habit of employing, when they speak of 
the eternity and absolute immutability of moral truth , 
might almost lead to the belief of something self-existing, 
which could not vary in any circumstances, nor be less 
powerful at any moment than at any other moment. Yirtue, 
however, it is evident, is nothing in itself, but is only a 
general name for certain actions, which excite, when 
contemplated by us, certain emotions. It is a felt relation 
to certain emotions, and nothing more, with no other 
universality, therefore, than that of the minds in which, on 
the contemplation of the same actions, the same emotions 
arise. We speak always of what our mind is formed to 
admire or hate, not of what it might have been formed to 
estimate differently ; and the supposed immutability, there- 
fore, has regard only to the existing constitution of things 
under that Divine Being who has formed our social nature 
as it is, and who, in thus forming it, may be considered as 
marking his own approbation of that virtue which we love, 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



39 



and his own disapprobation of that vice which he has 
rendered it impossible for us not to view with indignation 
or disgust. 

Such is the moderate sense of the absolute immutability 
of virtue, for which alone we can contend ; a sense in which 
virtue itself is supposed to become known to us as an object 
of our thought, only in consequence of certain emotions 
which it excites, and with which it is co-extensive and 
commensurable ; but, even in this moderate sense, it was 
necessary to make some limitations of the uniformity of 
sentiment supposed ; since it is abundantly evident, that 
the same actions, that is to say, the same agents, in tho 
same circumstances, willing and producing the same effects, 
are not regarded by all mankind with feelings precisely 
the same, nor even with feelings precisely the same by the 
same individual in every moment of his life. 

The first limitation which I made relates to the moments 
in which the mind is completely occupied and absorbed in 
other feelings ; when, for example, it is under the tem- 
porary influence of extreme passion, which incapacitates 
the mind for perceiving moral distinctions as it incapacitates 
it for perceiving distinctions of every sort. Virtue, though 
lost to our perception for a moment, however, is immediately 
perceived again with distinct vision as before, as soon as the 
agitation subsides. It is like the image of the sky on the 
bosom of a lake, which vanishes, indeed, while the waters 
are ruffled, but which reappears more and more distinctly, 
as every little wave sinks gradually to rest, till the return- 
ing calm shows again, in all its purity , the image of that 
Heaven which has never ceased to shine on it. 

The influence of passion, then, powerful as it unquestion- 
ably is in obstructing those peculiar emotions in which our 
moral discernment consists, is limited to the short period 
during which the passion rages. We are then as little 
capable of perceiving moral differences, as we should be, 



40 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



in the same circumstances, of distinguishing the universal 
truths of geometry ; and in both cases, from the same law 
of the mind, — that general law, by which one very vivid 
feeling of any sort lessens in proportion the vividness of 
any other feeling that may co-exist with it, or, in other 
cases, prevents the rise of feelings that are not accordant 
with the prevailing emotion, by inducing, in more ready 
suggestion, the feelings that are accordant with it. 

The next limitation which we made is of more conse- 
quence, as being far more extensive, and operating, there- 
fore, in some degree, in almost all the moral estimates which 
we form. This second limitation relates to cases in which 
the result of actions is complicated by a mixture of good 
and evil, and in which we may fix upon the good, when 
others fix on the evil, and may infer the intention in the 
agent of producing r this good, which is a part of the mixed 
result, while others may conceive him to have had in view 
the partial evil. The same actions, therefore, may be ap- 
proved and disapproved in different ages and countries, from 
the greater importance attached to the good or to the evil 
of such compound results, in relation to the general circum- 
stances of society, or the influence perhaps of political errors, 
as to the consequences of advantage or injury to society of 
these particular actions ; and, in the same age, and the 
same country, different individuals may regard the same 
action with very different moral feelings, from the higher 
attention paid to certain partial results of it, and the dif- 
ferent presumptions thence formed as to the benevolent or 
injurious intentions of the agent. Al] this, it is evident, 
might take place without the slightest mutability of the 
principle of moral sentiments ; because, though the action 
which is estimated may seem to be the satne in the cases 
in which it is approved and condemned, it is truly a differ- 
ent action which is so approved and condemned; a different 
action in the only sense in which an action has any mean- 
ing, as signifying the agent himself having certain views, 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



41 



and willing, in consequence, certain effects of supposed 
benefit or injury. 

A third limitation, often co-operating with the former, 
relates to the influence of habit and association in general, 
whether as extending to particular actions the emotions that 
have been gradually connected with the whole class of 
actions under which they have been arranged, or as modi- 
fying the sentiments of individuals by circumstances pecu- 
liar to the individuals themselves. It is pleasing to love 
those who are around us ; it is pleasing, above all, to love 
our immediate friends, and those domestic relations to whom 
we owe our being, or to whose society, in the first friend- 
ships which we were capable of forming, before our heart 
had ventured from the little world of home into the great 
world without, we owed the happiness of many years, of 
which we have forgotten every thing but that they were 
delightful. It is not merely pleasing to love these first 
friends ; we feel that it is a duty to love them ; that is to 
say, we feel that, unless in circumstances of extraordinary 
profligacy on their part, if we were not to love them, we 
should look upon ourselves with moral disapprobation. 
The feeling of this very duty mingles in our estimates of 
the conduct of those whom we love ; and it is in this way 
that association in such cases operates ; not by rendering 
vice in itself less an object of disapprobation than before, 
but by blending with our disapprobation of the action that 
love of the agent, which is, as it were, an opposite duty. 
It is the good which is mixed with the bad that we love, 
not the bad which is mixed with the good ; and the primary 
and paramount love of the good and hatred of the bad re- 
main ; though we may seem, in certain cases, to love the 
one less or more, to hate the other less or more, in conse- 
quence of the vivid images which association affords to 
heighten or reduce the force of the opposite sentiment, 
when the actions of which we approve or disapprove have a 
resemblance to the actions of those who have loved or made 



42 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



ns happy; whose love, therefore, and the con sequent happiness 
produced by them, arise, perhaps, to our mind at the very 
moment at which the similar action is contemplated by us. 

These three limitations, then, we must make ; limitations, 
the necessity of which it would have been natural for us to 
anticipate, though no objections had been urged to the ori- 
ginal differences of actions as objects of moral sentiment. 
But, making these limitations, — to some one or other of 
which the apparent anomalies may, I conceive, be referred, 
— do we not leave still unimpaired the great fundamental 
distinctions of morality itself; the moral approbation of the 
producer of unmixed good as good, the moral disapproba- 
tion of him who produces unmixed evil for the sake of evil? 
Where moral good and evil mix, the emotions may, indeed, 
be different ; but they are different, not because the pro- 
duction of evil is loved as the mere production of evil, and 
the production of good hated as the mere production of 
good ; it is only because the evil is tolerated for the good 
which is loved, and the good, perhaps, in other cases, for- 
gotten or unremarked, in the abhorrence of the evil which 
accompanies it. When some country is found, in which 
the intentional producer of pure unmixed misery is preferred 
on that very account, to the intentional producer of as 
much good as an individual is capable of producing, — some 
country, in which it is reckoned more meritorious to hate 
than to love a benefactor, merely for being a benefactor, 
and to love rather than to hate the betrayer of his friend, 
merely for being the betrayer of his friend, — then may 
the distinctions of morality be said to be as mutable, 
perhaps, as any other of the caprices of the most capri- 
cious fancy. But the denier of moral distinctions 
knows well, that it is impossible for him to prove the ori- 
ginal indifference of actions in this way. He knows that 
the intentional producer of evil, as pure evil, is always 
hated, the intentional producer of good, as pure good, 
always loved ; and he flatters himself, that he has succeeded 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



43 



in proving, by an easier way, that we are naturally indifferent 
to what the prejudiced term moral good and evil, merely by 
proving, that we love the good so very much, as to forget, 
in the contemplation of it, some accompanying evil ; and 
hate the evil so very much, as to forget, in the contem- 
plation of it, some accompanying good. 

One of our most popular moralists begins his inquiry into 
the truth of the natural distinctions of morality, by quoting 
from Valerius Maximus, an anecdote of most atrocious 
profligacy, which, he supposes, related to a savage, who had 
been " cut off in his infancy from all intercourse with his 
species, and consequently, under no possible influence of 
example, authority, education, sympathy, or habit ; and 
whose feelings, therefore, in hearing such a relation, if it 
were possible for us to ascertain what the feelings of such 
a mind would be, he would consider as decisive of the 
question." I quote the story as he has translated it. 

M The father of Caius Toranius had been proscribed by 
the Triumvirate. Caius Toranius, coming over to the 
interests of that party, discovered to the officers who were 
in pursuit of his father's life, the place where he had con- 
cealed himself, and gave them a description by which they 
might distinguish his person. The old man, more anxious 
for the safety and fortunes of his son, than about the little 
that might remain of his own life, began immediately to 
inquire of the officers who seized him, whether his son was 
well, whether he had done his duty to the satisfaction of his 
generals. 6 That son,' replied one of the officers, 4 that son, 
so dear to thy affections, betrayed thee to us. By his in- 
formation thou art apprehended and diest.' The officer, 
with this, struck a poniard to the old man's heart ; and the 
unhappy parent fell, not so much affected by his fate, as by 
the means to which he owed it." Auctore caedis quam ipsa 
caede miserior. 1 

It is necessary, for the very supposition which is made, 
1 Paley's Moral Philosophy. 



44 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



that the savage should understand, not merely what is meant 
by the simple relations of son and father, and all the con- 
sequences of the treachery of the son, but that he should 
know also the additional interest which the paternal and 
filial relation, in the whole intercourse of good offices from 
infancy to manhood, receives from this continued inter- 
course. The author of our mere being is not all which a father 
in such circumstances is ; he is far better kuown and loved 
by us as the author of our happiness in childhood and youth, 
and the venerable friend of our maturer years. If the 
savage, knowing this relation in its fullest extent, could yet 
feel no different emotions of moral regard and dislike, for 
the son and for the father, it would be easier to suppose, 
that a life of total privation of society had dulled his na- 
tural susceptibilities of emotion, than that he was originally 
void of these. But what reason is there to imagine, that, 
with this knowledge, he would not have the emotions which 
are felt by every human being to whom this story is related ? 
It is easy to assert, that knowing every relation of a son 
and father, as well as the consequence of the action, the 
savage would not feel what every other human being feels, 
because it is easy to assume, by begging the question, any 
point of controversy. But where is the proof of the asser- 
tion ? We cannot verify the supposition by exact experi- 
ment, indeed, for such a savage, so thoroughly exempted 
from every social prejudice, is not to be found, and could 
not be made to understand the story even if he were found. 
But, though we cannot have the perfect experiment, we 
may yet have an approximation to it. Every infant that 
is born may be considered very nearly as such a savage ; 
and as soon as the child is capable of knowing the very 
meaning of the words, without feeling half the force of the 
filial relation, he shudders at such a tale, with as lively 
abhorrence, perhaps, as in other years, when his prejudices 
and habits, and every thing which is not originally in his 
constitution, may be said to be matured. 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



45 



We can imagine vessels sent on voyages of benevolence, 
to diffuse over the world the blessings of a pure religion, 
we can imagine voyages of this kind to diffuse the improve- 
ments of our sciences and arts. But what should we think 
of a voyage, of which the sole object was to teach the 
world that all actions are not, in the moral sense of the 
term, absolutely indifferent, and that those who intention- 
ally do good to the society to which they belong, or to any 
individual of that society, ought to be objects of greater re- 
gard than he whose life has been occupied in plans to injure 
the society in general, or at least as many individuals of it 
as his power could reach ? What shore is there at which 
such a vessel could arrive, however barren the soil, and 
savage the inhabitants, where these simple doctrines, which 
it came to diffuse, could be regarded as giving any instruc- 
tion ? The half-naked animal, that has no hut in which to 
shelter himself, no provision beyond the precarious chase of 
the day, whose language of numeration does not extend 
beyond three or four, and who knows God only as some- 
thing which produces thunder and the whirlwind, even 
this miserable creature, at least as ignorant as he is helpless, 
would turn away from his civilized instructors with con- 
tempt, as if he had not heard any thing of which he was 
not equally aware before. The vessel which carried out 
these simple primary essential truths of morals might re- 
turn as it went. It could not make a single convert, 
because there would not have been one who Lad any doubts 
to be removed. If, indeed, instead of teaching these 
truths, the voyagers had endeavoured to teach the natives 
whom they visited the opposite doctrine, as to the absolute 
moral indifference of actions, there could then be little 
doubt that they might have taught something new, what- 
ever doubt there might justly be as to the number of the 
converts. 

When Labienus, after urging to Cato a variety of mo- 
tives, to induce him to consult the oracle of Ammon, in 



46 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



the neighbourhood of whose temple the little army had 
arrived, concludes with urging a motive which he supposed 
to have peculiar influence on the mind of that great man, 
that he should at least make use of the opportunity of in- 
quiring of a being who could not err, what it is which con- 
stitutes that moral perfection which a good man should 
have in view for the guidance of his life, 

Saltern virtutis amator 
Quaere quid est virtus, et posce exemplar honesti, 

how sublimely does the answer to this solicitation express 
the omnipresent divinity of virtue ! 

Ille Deo plenus, tacita quern mente gerebat, 
Effudit dignas adytis e pectore voces. 
Quid quaeri, Labiene, jubes ? An liber in armis 
Occubuisse velim potius, quam regna videre ? 
An noceat vis ulla bono ? Fortunaque perdat 
Opposita virtute minas ? Laudandaque velle 
Sit satis, et nunquam successu crescat honestum ? 
Scimus, et hoc nobis non altius inseret Ammon. 
Haeremus cuncti Superis, temploque tacente, 
Nil facimus non sponte Dei; nec vocibus ullis 
Numen eget : dixitque semel nascentibus auctor 
Quicquid scire licet : steriles nec legit arenas, 
Ut caneret paucis, mersitque hoc pulvere verum. 1 

. " Cast your eyes," says Rousseau, " over all the nations 
of the world, and all the histories of nations. Amid so 
many inhuman and absurd superstitions, amid that pro- 
digious diversity of manners and characters, you will find 
every where the same principles and distinctions of moral 
good and evil. The Paganism of the ancient world pro- 
duced, indeed, abominable gods, who on earth would have 
been shunned or punished as monsters, and who offered as 
a picture of supreme happiness, only crimes to commit, and 
passions to satiate. But Vice, armed with this sacred 
authority, descended in vain from the eternal abode : she 
found, in the heart of man, a moral instinct to repel her. 
1 Lucani Pharsalia, lib. ix. 563-567, and 569-577. 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



47 



The continence of Xenocrates was admired by those who 
celebrated the debaucheries of Jupiter — the chaste Lucretia 
adored the unchaste Yenus — the most intrepid Roman 
sacrificed to Fear. He invoked the god who dethroned his 
father, and he died without a murmur by the hand of his 
owe. The most contemptible divinities were served by the 
greatest men. The holy voice of Nature, stronger than 
that of the gods, made itself heard, and respected, and 
obeyed on earth, and seemed to banish, as it were, to the 
confinement of heaven, guilt and the guilty." 

There is, indeed, to borrow Cicero's noble description, 
one true and original law, conformable to reason and to 
nature, diffused over all, invariable, eternal, which calls to 
the fulfilment of duty and to abstinence from injustice, and 
which calls with that irresistible voice which is felt in all 
its authority wherever it is heard. This law cannot be 
abolished or curtailed, nor affected in its sanctions by any 
law of man. A whole senate, a whole people, cannot dis- 
pense from its paramount obligation. It requires no com- 
mentator to render it distinctly intelligible, nor is it differ- 
ent at Rome, at Athens, now, and in the ages before and 
after; but in all ages, and in all nations, it is, and has 
been, and will be, one and everlasting : one as that God, 
its great author and promulgator, who is the common Sove- 
reign of all mankind, is himself one. Man is truly man, as 
he yields to this divine influence. He cannot resist it, but 
by flying as it were from his own bosom, and laying aside 
the general feelings of humanity ; by which very act he 
must already have inflicted on himself the severest of pun- 
ishments, even though he were to avoid whatever is usually 
accounted punishment. "Est quidem vera lex, recta 
ratio, nature congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempi- 
terna, quae vocet ad officium jubendo, vetando a fraude 
deterreat ; quae tamen neque probos frustra jubet aut vetat, 
nec improbos jubendo aut vetando movet. Huic legi nec 
obrogari fas est, neque derogari ex hac aliquid licet, neque 



48 



OF THE NATURE AND SOURCE 



tota abrogari potest. Nec vero, aut per senatum aut per 
populum solvi hac lege possumus. Neque est quserendus 
explanator aut interpres ejus alius. Nec erit alia lex 
Romse, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac ; sed et omnes 
gentes, et omni tempore, una lex et sempiterna et immor- 
talis continebit ; unusque erit communis quasi magister, et 
Imperator omnium Deus ille, legis hujus inventor, discep- 
tator, lator ; cui qui non parebit, ipse se fugiet, ac 
naturam hominis aspernabitur, atque hoc ipso luet maxi- 
mas poenas, etiam si csetera supplicia qua) putantur effu- 
gerit." 

I have already, in a former Lecture, alluded to the 
strength of the evidence which is borne by the guilty, to 
the truth of those distinctions which they have dared to 
disregard. If there be any one who has an interest in 
gathering every argument which even sophistry can sug- 
gest, to prove that virtue is nothing, and vice therefore 
nothing, and who will strive to yield himself readily to 
this consolatory persuasion, it is surely the criminal who 
trembles beneath a weight of memory which he cannot 
shake off. Yet even he who feels the power of virtue only 
in the torture which it inflicts, does still feel this power, 
and feels it with at least as strong conviction of its reality, 
as those to whom it is every moment diffusing pleasure, 
and who might be considered perhaps as not very rigid 
questioners of an illusion which they felt to be delightful. 
The spectral forms of superstition have indeed vanished ; 
but there is one spectre which will continue to haunt the 
mind, as long as the mind itself is capable of guilt, and has 
exerted this dreadful capacity — the spectre of a guilty life, 
which does not haunt only the darkness of a few hours of 
night, but comes in fearful visitation, whenever the mind 
has no other object before it that can engage every thought, 
in the most splendid scenes and in the brightest hours of 
day. What enchanter is there who can come to the relief 
of a sufferer of this class, and put the terrifying spectre to 



OF OUR NOTIONS OF VIRTUE. 



49 



flight ? We may say to the murderer, that, in poisoning 
his friend, to succeed a little sooner to the estate which he 
knew that his friendship had bequeathed to him, he had 
done a deed as meritorious in itself, as if he had saved the 
life of his friend at the risk of his own ; and that all for 
which there was any reason to upbraid himself was, that 
he had suffered his benefactor to remain so many years in 
the possession of means of enjoyment, which a few grains of 
opium or arsenic might have transferred sooner to him. 
We may strive to make him laugh at the absurdity of the 
scene, when, on the very bed of death, that hand which had 
often pressed his with kindness before, seemed to press again 
with delight the very hand which had mixed and presented 
the potion. But though we may smile, if we can smile, at 
such a scene as this, and point out the incongruity with as 
much ingenious pleasantry as if we were describing some 
ludicrous mistake, there will be no laughter on that face from 
which we strive to force a smile. He who felt the grasp of 
that hand will feel it still, and will shudder at our descrip- 
tion ; and shudder still more at the tone of jocular merri- 
ment with which we describe what is to him so dreadful. 

What, then, is that theory of the moral indifference of 
actions which is evidently so powerless, of which even he 
who professes to regard it as sound philosophy, feels the 
impotence as much as other men ; when he loves the 
virtuous and hates the guilty, when he looks back with 
pleasure on some generous action, or with shame and 
horror on actions of a different kind, which his own sound 
philosophy would teach him to be, in every thing that 
relates to his own internal feelings, exclusively of the errors 
and prejudices of education, equal and indifferent ? It is 
vain to say, as if to weaken the force of this argument, 
that the same self-approving complacency, and the same 
remorse, are felt for actions which are absolutely insignifi- 
cant in themselves, for regular observance or neglect of the 
most frivolous rites of superstition. There can be no 

D 



50 



OF THE SYSTEM OF HOBBES. 



question that self-complacency and remorse are felt in such 
cases. But it surely requires little philosophy to perceive, 
that, though a mere ceremony of devotion may be truly 
insignificant in itself, it is far from insignificant when con- 
sidered as the command of Him to whose goodness we owe 
every thing which we value as great, and to disobey whose 
command, therefore, whatever the command may be, never 
can be a slight offence. To consider the ceremonial rite 
alone, without regard to him who is believed to have en- 
joined it, is an error as gross as it would be to read the 
statutes of some great people, and paying no attention to the 
legislative power which enacted them ; to laugh, perhaps, 
at the folly of those who thought it necessary to conform 
their conduct to a law, which was nothing but a series of 
alphabetic characters on a scrap of paper or parchment, 
that in a single moment could be torn to pieces or burnt. 

Why do we smile on reading, in the list of the works of 
the hero of a celebrated philosophic romance, that one 
of these was " a complete digest of the law of nature, 
with a review of those ; laws 9 that are obsolete or repealed, 
and of those that are ready to be renewed, and put in 
force ? " We feel that the laws of nature are laws which 
no lapse of ages can render obsolete, because they are every 
moment operating in every heart ; and which, for the same 
reason, never can be repealed, till man shall have ceased to 
be man. 

After these remarks on the general theory of the original 
moral indifference of actions, which considers all morality 
as adventitious without any original tendencies in the 
mind that could of themselves lead it to approve or dis- 
approve, it may be necessary still to take some notice of 
that peculiar modification of the theory, which denies all 
original obligation of justice, but asserts the authority of 
political enactment, not as attaching merely rewards to 
certain actions, and punishments to certain other actions, 



OF THE SYSTEM OF HOBBES. 



51 



but as producing the very notions of just and unjust, with 
all the kindred notions involved in them, and consequently 
a right, which it would be immorality as well as impru- 
dence to attempt to violate. 

Of this doctrine, which is to be traced in some writers 
of antiquity, but which is better known as the doctrine of 
Hobbes, who stated it with all the force which his acute- 
ness could give it, — a doctrine to which he was led in some 
measure perhaps by a horror of the civil dissensions of the 
period in which he wrote, and by a wish to lessen the 
inquisitorial and domineering influence of the priesthood of 
that fanatical age, by rendering even religion itself subject 
to the decision of the civil power; — the confutation is 
surely sufficiently obvious. A law, if there be no moral 
obligation, independent of the law, and prior to it, is only 
the expression of the desire of a multitude, who have 
power to punish, that is to say, to inflict evil of some kind 
on those who resist them ; it may be imprudent, therefore, 
to resist them ; that is to say, imprudent to run the risk 
of that precise quantity of physical suffering which is 
threatened ; but it can be nothing more. If there be no 
essential morality that is independent of law, an action 
does not acquire any new qualities by being the desire of 
one thousand persons rather than of one. There may be 
more danger, indeed, in disobeying one thousand than in 
disobeying one, but not more guilt. To use Dr. Cud- 
worth's argument, it must either be right to obey the law, 
and wrong to disobey it, or indifferent whether we obey it 
or not. If it be morally indifferent whether we obey it or 
not, the law, which may or may not be obeyed, with equal 
virtue, cannot be a source of virtue ; and if it be right to 
obey it, the very supposition that it is right to obey it, 
implies a notion of right and wrong that is antecedent to the 
law, and gives it its moral efficacy. But, without reason- 
ing so abstractly, are there, indeed, no differences of feeling 
in the breast of him who has violated a law, the essential 



52 



OF THE SYSTEM OF EOBBES. 



equity of which he feels, and of him whom the accumulated 
and ever-increasing wrongs of a whole nation have driven 
. to resist a force which, however long it may have been 
established, he feels to be usurpation and iniquity ; — who, 
w T ith the hope of giving freedom to millions has lifted 
against a tyrant, though armed with all the legal terrors, 
and therefore with all the morality and virtue of despotism, 
that sword, around which other swords are soon to gather, 
in hands as firm, and which, in the arm of him who lifts it, 
is almost like the standard of liberty herself? Why does 
the slave, who is led to the field, in which he is to combat 
for his chains against those who would release him and 
avenge his wrongs, feel himself disgraced by obedience, 
when to obey implicitly, whatever the power maybe which 
he obeys, is the very perfection of heroic virtue? and when 
he looks on the glorious rebel, as he comes forward with 
his fearless band, why is it that he looks, not with indigna- 
tion, but with an awful respect ; and that he feels his arm 
weaker in the fight, by the comparison of what he morally 
is, and of what those are whom he servilely opposes ? 

" A sovereign," it has been truly said, " may enact and 
rescind laws, but he cannot create or annihilate a single 
virtue." It might be amusing to consider, not one sove- 
reign only, but all the sovereigns of the different nations of 
the earth, endeavouring by law to change a virtue into a 
vice,— a vice into a virtue. If an imperial enactment of a 
senate of kings were to declare, that it was in future to be 
a crime for a mother to love her child, — for a child to 
venerate his parent,— if high privileges were to be attached 
to the most ungrateful, and an act of gratitude to a bene- 
factor declared to be a capital offence, — would the heart of 
man obey this impotent legislation.? Would remorse and 
self-approbation vary with the command of man, or of any 
number of men? and would he who, notwithstanding these 
laws, had obstinately persisted in the illegality of loving 
his parent or his benefactor, tremble to meet his own con-. 



OF THE SYSTEM OF HOBBES. 



53 



science with the horror which the parricide feels? There 
is, indeed, a power by which " princes decree justice ; " but 
it is a power above the mere voice of kings, — a power 
which has previously fixed in the breasts of those who 
receive the decree, a love of the very virtue which kings, 
even when kings are most virtuous, can only enforce. 
And it is well for man, that the feeble authorities of this 
earth cannot change the sentiments cf our hearts with the 
same facility as they can throw fetters on our hands. 
There would then, indeed, be no hope to the oppressed. 
The greater the oppression the stronger motive would there 
be to make obedience to oppression a virtue, and every 
species of guilt which the powerful might love to exercise, 
amiable in the eyes even of the miserable victims. All 
virtue, in such circumstances, would soon perish from the 
earth. A single tyrant would be sufficient to destroy, 
what all the tyrants that have ever disgraced this moral 
scene have been incapable of extinguishing, — the remorse 
which was felt in the bosom of him who could order every 
thing but vice and virtue, — and the scorn, and the sorrow, 
and the wrath of ev r ery noble heart, in the very contempla- 
tion of his guilty power. 

Xature has not thrown us upon the world with such 
feeble principles as these. She has given us virtues of 
which no power can deprive us, and has fixed in the soul of 
him whom more than fifty nations obey, a restraint on his 
power, from which the servile obedience of all the nations 
of the globe could not absolve him. There may be 
flatterers to surround a tyrant's throne, with knees ever 
ready to bow on the very blood with which its steps are 
stained, and with voices ever ready to applaud the guilt 
that has been already perpetrated, and to praise, even with 
a sort of prophetic quickness of discernment, the cruelties 
in prospect which they only anticipate. There may be 
servile warriors, to whom it is indifferent whether they 
succour or oppress, whether they enslave or free, if they 



OF THE SYSTEM OF HOBBES. 



have only drowned in blood, with sufficient promptness, 
the thousands of human beings whom they have been com- 
manded to sweep from the earth. There may be statesmen 
as servile, to whom the people are nothing, and to whom 
every thing is dear, but liberty and virtue. These eager 
emulators of each other's baseness may sound for ever in 
the ears of him on whose vices their own power depends, 
that what he has willed must be right, because he has 
willed it ; and priests still more base, from the very dignity 
of that station which they dishonour, not content with pro- 
claiming that crimes are right, may add their consecrating 
voice, and proclaim that they are holy, because they are 
the deeds of a vicegerent of that Holiness which is supreme. 
But the flatteries which only sound in the ear, or play, 
perhaps, with feeble comfort around the surface of the heart, 
are unable to reach that deeper-seated sense of guilt which 
is within. 

In subjecting, for the evident good of all, whole multi- 
tudes to the sway of a few, or of one, Nature then, as we 
have seen, has thrown over them a shelter, which power 
may, indeed, violate, but which it cannot violate with 
impunity ; since, even when it is free from every other 
punishment, it is forced, however reluctantly, to become 
the punisher of itself. This shelter, under which alone 
human weakness is safe, and which does not give protection 
only, but happiness, is the shelter of virtue, the shelter of 
moral love and hate, of moral pity and indignation, of 
moral joy and remorse. Life, indeed, and many of the 
enjoyments which render social life delightful, may, at 
least on a great part of the surface of the earth, be at the 
mercy of a power that may seem to attack, or forbear, with 
no restraint but the caprice of its own will. Yet, before 
even these can be assailed, there is a voice which warns to 
desist, and a still more awful voice of condemnation, when 
tie warning has been disregarded. For our best enjoy- 
ments, our remembrances of virtue, and our wishes of 



/ 



OF THE SYSTEM OF HOBBES. 55 

virtue, we are not dependent on the mercy, nor even on 
the restraints of power. Nature has provided for them 
with all her care, by placing them where no force can 
reach. In freedom, or under tyranny, they alike are safe 
from aggression ; because, wherever the arm can find its 
way, there is still conscience beyond. The blow which 
reaches the heart itself, cannot tear from the heart what, in 
life, has been happiness or consolation, and what, in death, 
is a happiness that needs not to be comforted. 

Our own felicity is then, truly, in no slight degree, as 
Goldsmith says, consigned to ourselves, amidst all the 
varieties of social institutions. 

In every government, though terrors reign, 
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain, 
How small, of all that human hearts endure, 
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure ! 
Still to ourselves, in every place, consign'd, 
Our own felicity we make or find. 
With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, 
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy. 
The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel, 
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel, 
To men remote from power but rarely known, 
Leave reason, faith, and conscience all our own. 1 

" So far," says Cicero, " is virtue from depending on the 
enactment of kings, that it is as ancient as the system of 
nature itself, or as the great Being by whom nature was 
formed." " Yis ad recte facta vocandi et a peceatis 
avocandi, non modo senior est, quam aetas populorum et 
civitatum, sed aequalis illius coelum atque terras tuentis et 
regentis Dei : — Nee si, regnante Tarquinio, nulla erat 
Homae scripta lex de stupris, idcirco non contra illam 
legem sempiternam, Sextus Tarcminius vim Lucretiae 
attulit. Erat enim ratio profecta a rerum natura, et ad 
recte faciendum impellens et a dilicto avocans, quae non 



1 Concluding verses of K The Traveller." 



56 



of mandeyille's system. 



turn denique incipit lex esse cum scripta est, sed tum cum 
orta est ; orta autem simul est cum mente divina." 1 The 
law, on which right and wrong depend, did not begin to be 
law when it was written : it is older than the ages of 
nations and cities, and contemporary with the very eternity 
of God. 



LECTURE IV. 

OP THE SYSTEM OF MANDEVILLE. — OF THE INFLUENCE OF REASON ON 
OUR MORAL SENTIMENTS. — OF THE SYSTEMS OF CLARKE AND 
WOLLASTON. 

In the inquiries which haYe last engaged us, we have 
seen what that susceptibility of moral emotion is, to which 
we owe our notions of virtue and Yice, in all their relative 
variety of aspects : we have seen in what sense it is to be 
understood as an original principle of our common nature, 
and what limitations it is necessary to give to its absolute 
universality. There is a sophistry, however, the errors of 
which it was necessary to state to you, that confounds, in 
these limitations, the primary distinctions themselves ; and 
supposes that it has shown the whole system of morals to 
be founded on accidental prejudices, when, in opposition to 
the millions of millions of cases, that obviously confirm the 
truth of an original tendency to certain moral preferences, 
it has been able to exhibit a few facts which it professes to 
regard as anomalous. The fallacy of this objection I 
endeavoured, accordingly, to prove to you, by showing that 
the supposed anomalies arise, not from defect of original 
moral tendencies, but from the operation of other principles 
which are essential parts of our mental constitution, like 

1 De Legibus,.lib. ii. c. 4, of Gruter's notation, or c. 8, 9, 10, of the 
common notation, Trith some alterations and omissions. 



of mandeville's system. 



57 



our susceptibility of moral emotion ; which are not, how- 
ever, more essential parts of it than that moral susceptibility 
itself, and which, even in modifying our sentiments of 
approbation and disapprobation, produce this effect, not by 
altering the principle which approves and disapproves, but 
the objects which we contemplate when these emotions 
arise. In the conclusion of my lecture,* I examined the 
kiudred sophistry of those political moralists, who, con- 
sidering right and wrong as of human institution, in their 
denial of every primary distinction of morals, found a sort 
of artificial virtue on obedience to the civil power ; forget- 
ting that their very assertion of the duty of obedience, 
supposes a feeling of duty antecedent to the law itself; and 
that there are principles of equity, according to which 
even positive laws are judged, and, though approved in 
many cases, in many cases also condemned, by the 
moral voice within the breast, as inconsistent with that 
feeling of justice which is prior and paramount to the law 
itself. 

In some measure akin to the theory of these political 
moralists, since it ascribes morality, in like manner, to 
human contrivance, is the system of Mandeville, who 
considers the general praise of virtue to be a mere artifice 
of political skill ; and what the world consents to praise as 
virtue in the individual, to be a mere imposition on the part 
of the virtuous man. Human life, in short, according to 
him, is a constant intercourse of hypocrisy with hypocrisy ; 
in which, by an involuntary self-denial, present enjoyment 
of some kind or other is sacrificed for the pleasure of that 
praise which society, as cunning as the individual self- 
denier, is ready, indeed, to give, but gives only in return 
for sacrifices that are made to its advantage. His system, 
to describe it a little more fully, as stated in the inquiry 
into the origin of moral virtue, prefixed to his remarks on 
his own Fable of the Bees, is simply this, — that man, like 
all other animals, is naturally solicitous only of his personal 

p 2 



58 



of mandeville's system. 



gratification, without regard to the happiness or misery of 
others ; that the great point, with the original lawgivers or 
tamers of these human animals, was to obtain from them 
the sacrifice of individual gratification, for the greater 
happiness of others ; that this sacrifice, however, could not 
be expected from creatures that cared only for themselves, 
unless a full equivalent were offered for the enjoyment 
sacrificed ; that as this, at least in the greater number of 
cases, could not be found in objects of sensual gratification, 
or in the means of obtaining sensual gratification which are 
given in exchange in common purchases, it was necessary 
to have recourse to some other appetite of man ; that the 
natural appetite of man for praise readily presented itself, 
for this useful end, and that, by flattering him into the 
belief that he would be counted nobler for the sacrifices 
which he might make, he was led, accordingly, to purchase 
this praise by a fair barter of that, which, though he valued 
it much, and would not have parted with it but for some 
equivalent or greater gain, he still valued less than the 
praise which he was to acquire; that the moral virtues, 
therefore, to use his strong expression, are " the political 
offspring which flattery begot upon pride and that, when 
we think that we see virtue, we see only the indulgence of 
some frailty, or the expectation of some praise. 

Such is the very licentious system as to moral virtue, of 
this satirist of man ; whose doctrine, false as it is, as a 
general view of human nature, has, in the world, so many 
instances which seem to correspond with it, that a super- 
ficial observer, who is little accustomed to make distinc- 
tions, extends readily to all mankind, what is true only of 
a part, and because some who wish to appear virtuous are 
hypocrites, conceives that all virtue is hypocrisy; in the 
same way as such a superficial thinker would have admitted 
any other error, stated in language as strong, and with 
images and pictures as vivid. 

It would be idle to repeat, in particular application to 



of mandeville's system. 



59 



this system, the general remarks which I made in my 
former lectures, on the early appearances of moral emotion, 
as marking an original distinction of actions, that excite in 
us moral approbation, from those which do not excite it, 
and which excite the opposite feeling of moral disapproba- 
tion. I shall not even appeal to the conscience of him who 
has had the happiness of performing a generous action, 
without the slightest regard to the praise of man, which 
was, perhaps, not an object even of conception at all, and 
certainly not till the action itself was performed. But we 
may surely ask, in this case, as much as in any mere 
physical hypothesis, by what authority so extensive a 
generalization is made from so small a number of particular 
cases ? If, indeed, we previously take for granted that all 
virtue is hypocrisy, every case of virtue which we perceive 
seeming to us a case of hypocrisy, may be regarded only 
as an illustration of the doctrine, to the universal truth of 
which we have already given our assent. But if we consent 
to form our general conclusion before examination, and 
then to adapt our particular conclusions to the previous 
general belief, this sort of authority may be found, for the 
wildest hypothesis, in physics, as much as for that moral 
hypothesis, the licentiousness of which is founded on the 
same false logic. We have only to take the hypothesis, 
however wild, for granted ; and then the facts will be, or 
will be considered to be, illustrations of it. The question 
is not, whether, on the supposition of universal hypocrisy, 
all seeming virtue be imposition, for in that case there 
could be no doubt ; but whether all virtue be hypocrisy ; 
and for this, it is surely necessary to have some stronger 
proof than the mere fact that some men are hypocrites ; or 
even the very probable inference, that there is a great deal 
of hypocrisy (as there is a great deal of virtuous benevo- 
lence or self-command) which we are not capable of 
discovering, and to which, accordingly, we may erroneously 
have given the praise of virtue. The love of praise may be 



60 



of mande ville' s system. 



a universal principle; but it is not more truly universal 
than the feeling of right and wrong, in some one or other 
of their forms ; and of two feelings, equally universal, it is 
as absurd to deny the reality of one, as the reality of the 
other. All actions have not one object. Some are the 
result of a selfish love of praise ; some of a generous love of 
virtue, that is to say, of love of those whose happiness 
virtue can promote. The secret motives of mankind, indeed, 
in this variety of possible objects, cannot be known ; and 
ihe paradox of Dr. Alande ville, therefore, has this advan- 
tage, that it is impossible to say, in any case of virtue, 
" Here is virtue that has no regard to praise," since he has 
still the power of answering, that there may be a desire of 
praise, though it is not visible to us. But, to reasoning of 
this sort there is no limit. If we be fond of paradoxes, it 
is easy to assert that there is no such state as that of health, 
and to prove it in exactly the same manner, by showing, 
that many who seem blooming and vigorous are the 
victims of some inward malady ; and that it is, therefore, 
impossible for us, in pointing out any one, to say, there is 
health in this young and active frame ; since the bloom 
which we admire may be only the covering of a disease 
that is soon to prey on the very beauty which it seemed, 
perhaps for the time, to heighten with additional loveliness. 
If it be easy to make a little system like that of Maude- 
ville, which reduces all virtue to the love of praise, it is 
just as easy to reverse the system, and to make all love of 
praise a modification of the purest virtue. We love it, it 
may be said, merely that we may give delight to those who 
love us, and who feel a lively interest in all the honours 
which can be lavished on us. This theory may be false, or 
rather truly is so ; but however false, or even absurd, it is 
as philosophic in every respect as the opposite theory of 
Mande ville, since it proceeds, exactly in the same way, on 
the exclusive consideration of a certain elementary part of 
our mixed nature, and extends universally what is only 



OF mandeville's system. 



61 



partially true. Indeed, the facts which support it, if every 
one were to consult his memory, in the earliest years to 
which he can look back on his original feelings, are stronger, 
in support of this false generous hypothesis, than of that 
false ungenerous hypothesis, to which I have opposed it. 
What delight did the child feel, in all his little triumphs, 
when he thought of the pleasure which his parents were to 
feel ! When his lesson was well learned, and rewarded 
with its due commendation, there were other ears than 
those around, which he would have wished to have heard ; 
and if any little prize was allotted as a memorial of 
excellence, the pleasure which he felt on receiving it was 
slight, compared with the pleasure with which he after- 
wards saw it in other hands, and looked to other eyes, 
when he returned to his home. Such, it might be said, is 
the origin of that love of praise which we feel ; and its 
growth in the progress of life, when praise is sought in 
greater objects, is only the growth of the same generous 
passion. But I will not dwell louger on an hypothesis 
which I have stated as false, and obviously false, though, 
obviously false as it is, it is, at least, as well founded as 
that of Mandeville. My only object is, to show you, by 
this complete reversal of his reasoning, with equal semblance 
of probability, that his hypothesis is but an hypothesis. 

But how comes it in this system, which must account for 
our own emotions, as well as for the emotions of others, 
that we do approve of certain actions, as virtuous, without 
valuing them for the mere love of praise, and condemn even 
the love of praise itself, when the good of the world is 
intentionally sacrificed to it ? I will admit, for a moment, 
to Mandeville, that we are all hypocrites ; that we know 
the game of human life, and play our parts in it accordingly. 
In such circumstances, we may indeed assume the appear- 
ance of virtue ourselves ; but how is it, that we feel appro- 
bation of others assuming the same disguise, when we are 
aware of its nature, and know virtue in all the actions 



62 



OF THE INFLUENCE OF REASON 



which go under that well-sounding name, to be only a more 
or less skilful attempt at imposition ? The mob in the 
gallery may, indeed, wonder at all the transmutations in 
the pantomime, and the silliest among them may believe 
that harlequin has turned the cdown into a fruit-stand, and 
himself into a fruit- worn an : but, however wide the wonder, 
or the belief may be, he who invented these very changes, 
or is merely one of the subordinate shifters of the scenery, 
cannot surely be a partaker of the illusion. What juggler 
ever deceived his own eyes ? Katerfelto, indeed, is 
described by Cowper, as K with his hair on end, at his 
own wonders wondering." But Katerfelto himself, who 
" wondered for his bread," could not feel much astonishment, 
even when he was fairly giving the greatest astonishment 
to others. It must be the same with the moral juggler. 
He knows the cheat : and he cannot feel admiration. If 
he can truly feel esteem, he feels that love of virtue, and 
consequently that distinction of actions, as virtuous or 
worthy of moral approbation, which Mandeville denies. 
He may be a dupe, indeed, in the particular case, but he 
cannot even be a dupe, without believing that virtue is 
something nobler than a fraud ; and, if he believe virtue to 
be more noble, he must have feelings nobler than any which 
the system of Mandeville allows. In believing that it is 
possible for man not to be a hypocrite, he may be considered 
almost as proving, that he has not, uniformly, been a 
hypocrite himself. 

Even if the belief of a ~" ; :e:n of this sort, which, as we 
have seen, has no force but that which it lerives from the 
very common paralogism of asserting the universal truth of 
a partial conclusion ; even if this miserable belief were to 
have no tendency directly injurious to the morals of those 
who admit it. the mere loss of happiness which it would 
occasion, by the constant feeling of distrust to which it 
must give rise, would of itself be no slight evil. To regard 
even every stranger, on whom our eves could fall, a-s 



ON OUR MORAL SENTIMENTS. 



63 



engaged in one unremitting plan of deceit, all deceiving, 
and all to a certain degree deceived, would be to look on 
society with feelings that would make absolute soltitude 
comparatively pleasing ; and, if to regard strangers in this 
light would be so dreadful, how far more dreadful would it 
be, to look, with the same distrust, on those in whom we 
had been accustomed to confide as friends — to see dissimu- 
lation in every eye — in the look of fondness of the parent, 
the wife, the child, the very caress and seeming innocence 
of infancy ; and to think, that, the softer every tone of 
affection was to our ear, the more profound was the false- 
hood, which had made it softer, only that it might the more 
surely deceive ! It is gratifying to find, that a system, 
which would make this dreadful transformation of the 
whole moral world, is but an hypothesis ; and an hypothesis 
so unwarrantable, because so inconsistent with every feeling 
of our heart. Yet it is unfortunately a paradox, which 
admits of much satirical picturing ; and while few pause 
sufficiently to discover its logical imperfections, it is very 
possible that some minds may be seduced by the mere 
lively colouring of the pictures, to suppose, in spite of all 
the better feelings of which they are conscious, that the 
representation which is given of human life is true, because 
a few characters in human life are truly drawn. A rash 
assent may be given to the seeming penetration which such 
a view of the supposed artifices of morality involves ; and 
after assent is once rashly given, the very generosity that 
might have appeared to confute the system, will be regarded 
only as an exemplification of it. I feel it the more my 
duty, therefore, to warn you against the adoption of a 
system, so false to the excellence of our moral nature ; not 
because it is false only, though, even from the grossness of 
its theoretic falsehood alone, it is unworthy of a single 
moment's philosophic assent, but still more, because the 
adoption of it must poison the virtue, and the happiness 
still more than the virtue, of every mind which admits it. 



01 THE INFLUENCE OF REASON 



There is scarcely any action for which it is not possible 
to invent some unworthy motive. If our system requires 
the invention of one, the invention, we may be sure, will 
very speedily take place : and with the loss of that amiable 
confidence of virtue, which believed and was believe 5. how 
much of happiness, too, will be lost, or rather, how little 
happiness will afterwards remain ! 

A slight extension of the system of Maudeville pr; luces 
that general selfish system of morals which reduces all 
virtue to the desire of the individual good of the agent. On 
this it will be necessary to dwell a little more fully, not so 
much for the purpose of exposing the fallacy of the system 
itself, important as this exposure is, as for explaining that 
relation of utility to virtue, of which we so frequently hear, 
without any very accurate meaning attached to the relation. 

In the first place, however, since actions can be estimated 
as more or less useful, only by that faculty which analyzes 
and compares, it will be of advantage to make some 
remarks on the influence of reason on our moral sentiments, 
and on those theories which, proceeding beyond this 
indisputable influence, would reduce to mere reason, as if 
it were the great principle of virtue itself the whole moral 
phenomena of our approbation of good and disapprobation 
of evil. 

If all the act:: us :: which man is car able, had terminate] 
in one simple result of good or evil, without any mixture 
of both, or any further consequences, reason, I conceive, 
would have been of no advantage whatever, in determining 
moral sentiments that most, in that case, have arisen imme- 
diately on the consideration of the simple rtrect, and ; : 
the will of producing that simple effect. Of the intentional 
production of good, as good, we should have approved 
instantly ; of the intentional production of evil, as evil, we 
should as instantly have disapproved ; and reason could 
not. in such circumstances, have taught us :; love the cue 
more, or hate the other less ; certainly not to love what we 



ON OUR MORAL SENTIMENTS. 



65 



should otherwise have hated, nor to hate what we should 
otherwise have loved. But actions have not one simple 
result, in most cases. In producing enjoyment to some, 
they may produce misery to others, either by consequences 
that are less or more remote, or by their own immediate 
but compound operation. It is impossible, therefore, to 
discover instantly, or certainly, in any particular case, the 
intention of the agent, from the apparent result ; and 
impossible for ourselves to know, instantly, when we wish 
to perform a particular action, for a particular end, whether 
it may not produce more evil than good, when the good 
was our only object, — or more good than evil, when our 
object was the evil only. Reason, therefore, that power 
by which we discover the various relations of things, comes 
to our aid, and pointing out to us all the probable physical 
consequences of actions, shows us the good of what we 
might have conceived to be evil, the evil of what we 
might have conceived to be good, weighing each with each, 
and calculating the preponderance of either. It thus 
influences our moral feelings indirectly ; but it influences 
them only by presenting to us new objects, to be admired 
or hated, and still addresses itself to a principle which 
admires or hates. Like a telescope, or microscope, it 
shows us what was too distant, or too minute, to come 
within the sphere of our simple vision ; but it does not 
alter the nature of vision itself. The best telescope, or the 
best microscope, could give no aid to the blind. They 
imply the previous power of visual discernment, or they are 
absolutely useless. Reason, in like manner, supposes in us 
a discriminating vision of another kind. By pointing out 
to us innumerable advantages or disadvantages, that flow 
from an action, it may heighten or reduce our approbation 
of the action, and consequently our estimate of the virtue 
of him whom we suppose to have had this whole amount of 
good or evil in view, in his intentional production of it ; 
but it does this only because we are capable of feeling 



66 



OF THE INFLUENCE OF REASON 



moral regard for the intentional producer of happiness to 
others, independently of any analyses which reason may 
make. If we did not love what is for the good of mankind, 
and love, consequently, those actions which tend to the 
good of mankind, it would be vain for reason to show, that 
an action was likely to produce good, of which we were not 
aware, or evil of which we were not aware. It is very different, 
however, when we consider the mind as previously susceptible 
of moral emotion. If our emotion of approbation, when we 
meditate on the propriety of a particular action, depend, in any 
degree, on our belief of resulting good, and our disapprobation, 
in any degree, on our belief of resulting evil ; to show that the 
good of which we think is slight, when compared with the 
evil which accompanies or follows it, is, perhaps, to change 
wholly our approbation into disapprobation. We should 
feel, in such circumstances, a disapprobation of ourselves, 
if, with the clearer view of consequences now presented to 
us, we are to continue to desire to perform the very action, 
to have abstained from which before would have excited 
our remorse. The utility of reason, then, is sufficiently 
obvious, even in morality ; since, in a world so complicated 
as this, in which various interests are continually mingling, 
and in which the good of one may be the evil of many ; a 
mere blind obedience to that voice, which would tell us 
instantly, and without reflection, in every case, to seek the 
good of any one, as soon as it was in our power to be 
instrumental to it, might produce the misery of many 
nations, or of many ages, in the relief of a few temporary 
wants of a few individuals. By far the greater portion of 
political evil, which nations suffer, arises, indeed, from this 
very source, not so much from the tyranny of power, 
however tyrannical power may too frequently have been, 
as from its erring benevolence, in the far greater number 
of cases, in which it was exercised with the wish of 
promoting that very good which was delayed, or, perhaps, 
wholly impeded, by the very means that were chosen to 



ON OUR MORAL SENTIMENTS. 



67 



further it. If those rulers, who were truly desirous of the 
happiness of their people, had only known how they could 
most effectually produce that happiness which they wished, 
there can be no question, that the earth at present would 
have exhibited appearances very different from those which, 
on the greater part of its surface, meet our melancholy 
view ; that it would then have presented to us an aspect 
of general freedom and happiness, which not man only, but 
the great Father and lover of man, might have delighted to 
behold. Reason, then, though it is incapable of giving 
birth to the notion of moral excellence, has yet important 
relations to that good which is the direct object of morality. 
Let none with heedless tongue from Truth disjoin 
The reign of Virtue. Ere the dayspring flow'd, 
Like sisters link'd in Concord's golden chain, 
They stood before the great Eternal Mind, 
Their common parent ; and by him were both 
Sent forth among his creatures, hand in hand, 
Inseparably join'd : nor e'er did Truth 
Find an apt ear to listen to her lore, 
Which knew not Virtue's yoice ; nor, save where Truth's 
Majestic words are heard and understood, 
Doth Virtue deign to inhabit. Go, inquire 
Of Nature ; not among Tartarean rocks, 
Whither the hungry vulture with its prey 
Returns ; not where the lion's sullen roar 
At noon resounds along the lonely banks 
Of ancient Tigris ; but her gentler scenes, 
The dovecot, and the shepherd's fold at morn, 
Consult ; or by the meadow's fragrant hedge, 
In spring-time, when the woodlands first are green, 
Attend the linnet singing to his mate, 
Couch'd o'er their tender young. To this fond care 
Thou dost not Virtue's honourable name 
Attribute : wherefore, save that not one gleam 
Of truth did e'er discover to themselves 
Their little hearts, or teach them, by the effects 
Of that parental love, the love itself 
To judge, and measure its officious deeds ? 
But man, whose eyelids Truth has fill'd with day, 



68 



OF THE SYSTEMS OF 



Discerns how skilfully to bounteous ends 
His wise affections move ; with free accord 
Adopts their guidance ; yields himself secure 
To Nature's prudent impulse ; and converts 
Instinct to duty and to sacred law. 1 

Important, however, as reason is, in pointing out all the 
possible physical consequences of actions, and all the dif- 
ferent degrees of probability of these, it must not be for- 
gotten, that this is all which it truly does ; that our moral 
sentiment itself depends on another principle of our mind ; 
and that, if we had not previously been capable of loving 
the good of others as good, and of hating the production of 
evil as evil, to show us that the happiness of every created 
being depended on our choice, would have excited in us as 
little eagerness to do what was to be so extensively bene- 
ficial, as if we had conceived, that only a single individual 
was to profit by it, or no individual whatever. 

These remarks will show you the inadequacy of the moral 
systems, which make virtue, in our contemplation of it, a 
sort of product of reasoning, like any other abstract relation 
which we are capable of discovering intellectually ; that of 
Clarke, for example, which supposes it to consist in the 
regulation of our conduct, according to certain fitnesses 
which we perceive in things, or a peculiar congruity of cer- 
tain relations to each other ; and that of Wollaston, which 
supposes virtue to consist in acting according to the truth 
of things, in treating objects according to their real char- 
acter, and not according to a character or properties which 
they truly have not, — a system which is virtually the same 
as that of Clarke, expressing only more awkwardly what 
is not very simply developed, indeed, even in Dr. Clarke's 
speculations. These systems, independently of their general 
defect, in making incongruity — which, as mere incongruity, 
bears no proportion to vice, but is often greatest in the most 

1 Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, Book II. 158-190, second 
form of the Poem. 



CLARKE AIS'D WOLLASTON. 



69 



frivolous improprieties — the measure of vice, assume, it 
must be remembered, the previous existence of feelings, for 
which all the congruities of which they speak, and the mere 
power of discovering such congruities, are insufficient to 
account. There must be a principle of moral regard, inde- 
pendent of reason ; or reason may, in vain, see a thousand 
fitnesses, and a thousand truths, and would be warmed with 
the same lively emotions of indignation against an inaccu- 
rate timepiece, or an error in arithmetical calculation, as 
against the wretch who robbed, by every fraud which could 
elude the law, those who had already little of which they 
could be deprived, that he might riot a little more luxuri- 
ously, while the helpless, whom he had plundered, were 
starving around him. 

Fitness, as understood by every one, is obviously a word 
expressive only of relation. It indicates skill, indeed, in 
the artist, whatever the end may be ; but, considered ab- 
stractly from the nature of the end, it is indicative of skill 
only. It is to the good or evil of the end that we look, 
and that we must always look, in estimating the good or 
evil of the fitness itself ; and if it be the nature of the end 
which gives value to the fitness, it is not the fitness, but the 
end to which the fitness is subservient, that must be the 
true object of moral regard. The fitness of virtue for pro- 
ducing serene delight, is not, as mere fitness, greater than 
that of vice for producing disquietude and wretchedness ; 
and we act, therefore, as much according to the mere fit- 
nesses of things, in being vicious as being virtuous. If the 
world had been adapted for the production of misery, with 
fitnesses opposite indeed in kind, but exactly equal in 
number and nicety of adjustment to those which are at 
present so beautifully employed in the production of happi- 
ness, we should still have framed our views and our actions 
according to these fitnesses ; but our moral view of the 
universe and of its author would have been absolutely 
reversed. We should have seen the fitnesses of things 



70 



OF THE SYSTEMS OF 



precisely as before, but we should have seen them with 
hatred instead of love. 

Since every human action, then, in producing any effect 
whatever, must be in conformity with the fitnesses of things, 
the limitation of virtue to actions which are in conformity 
with these fitnesses, has no meaning, unless we have pre- 
viously distinguished the ends which are morally good from 
the ends which are morally evil, and limited the conformity 
of which we speak, to the one of these classes. In thi3 
case, however, the theory of fitnesses, it is evident, far from 
accounting for the origin of moral distinctions, proceeds on 
the admission of them ; it presupposes a distinctive love of 
certain virtuous ends, by their relation to which all the 
fitnesses of actions are to be measured ; and the system of 
Dr. Clarke, therefore, if stripped of its pompous phrase- 
ology, and translated into common language, is nothing 
more than the very simple truism or tautology, that to act 
virtuously is to act in conformity with virtue. 

From this doctrine of conformity to the fitness of things 
the theory of Wollaston, in which virtue is represented to 
consist in the conformity of our actions to the true nature 
of things, scarcely differs, as I have said, in any respect, 
unless as being a little more circuitous and complicated. 
The truth of which "Wollaston speaks, is only virtue under 
another name ; and if we had no previous notions of moral 
good and evil, — no love of the happiness of others more 
than of their misery, it would be absolutely impossible to 
determine whether virtue or vice were truth or falsehood, 
even in the sense in which he uses these terms. If, indeed, 
we previously take for granted that it is the nature, the 
true nature, of the parent to be loved by the child, of the 
child to love the parent, we cannot then, it will be allowed, 
have any hesitation in admitting that the child, in perform- 
ing offices of tenderness to the parent, treats the parent 
according to his true nature ; and that, if he were to treat 
him unkindly, he would treat him not according to his true 



CLARKE AND WOLLASTON. 



71 



nature, but as if he were a foe, to whose true nature such 
usage would be accordant. In taking for granted this 
very nature, however, the agreement or disagreement with 
which we have chosen to denominate truth or falsehood, is 
it not evident that we have taken for granted all those 
duties which are strangely said to depend on the perception 
of an agreement, that cannot even be conceived by us, till 
the duties themselves, as constituting the real nature or 
truth of our various relations, in the actions which are said 
to agree with it, have been previously supposed? If there 
were no previous belief of the different moral relations of 
foes and friends, but all were regarded by us as indifferent, 
how eould any species of conduct which was true with re- 
spect to the one, be false with respect to the other ? It is 
false indeed to nature, but it is false to nature only because 
it is false to that virtue which, before we thought of truth 
or falsehood, distinguished, with the clear perception of 
different moral duties, our benefactor from our insidious 
enemy. 

The work of Mr. "Wollaston, which, with all its pedantry 
of ostentatious erudition, and the manifest absurdity of its 
leading principle, has many profound reflections and acute 
remarks, which render it valuable on its own account, ap- 
pears to me, however, I must confess, more valuable for the 
light which it indirectly throws on the nature of the pre- 
judices that pervert our judgment, than for the truths which 
it contains in itself. If I were desirous of convincing any 
one of the influence of a system in producing, in the mind 
of its author, a ready acquiescence in errors the most ab- 
surd, and in explanations far more necessary to be explained 
than the very difficulties which they professed to remove 
or illustrate, I know no work which I could put into his 
hands better suited for this purpose than the Religion of 
Nature Delineated. Who but the author of such a system 
could believe for a moment that parricide is a crime only 
for the same reason which would make it a crime for any 



OF THE SYSTEMS OF 



one (and, if the great principle of the system be just, a 
crime exactly of the same amount) to walk across a room on 
his hands and feet, because he would then be guilty of the 
practical untruth of using his hands, not as if they were 
hands, but as if they were feet ; as, in parricide, he would 
be guilty of the practical untruth of treating a parent as if 
he were not a parent, but a robber or a murderer ? Even 
without considering guilt so atrocious, is common cruelty, 
in any of its forms, made hateful to us as it should be, or 
even hateful in the slightest degree of moral disgust, by 
being represented only as the half-ludicrous falsehood of 
affirming practically, that a man is not a man capable of 
feeling, but an insensible post ? and is it only for a similar 
falsehood, in this tacit proposition, which we are supposed 
by our negligence to affirm, that we should reproach our- 
selves, if we had left any one to perish, whom a slight effort 
on our part would have saved from destruction ? " Should 
I find a man grievously hurt by some accident," says AVol- 
laston, " fallen down, alone, and, without pre^nt help, like 
to perish, or see his house on fire, nobody being near to 
help or call out ; in this extremity, if I do not give him my 
assistance immediately, I do not do it at all ; and by this 
refusing to do it according to my ability, I deny his case 
to be what it is ; human nature to be what it is ; and even 
those desires and expectations which I am conscious to my- 
self I should have under the like misfortune, to be what 
they are." 1 These strange denials we certainly do not 
make ; all which we tacitly declare is, on the contrary, a 
truth, and a truth of the most unquestionable kind. We 
affirm ourselves to be what we are, indifferent to the 
miseries of others : and if to affirm a truth by our actions 
be all which constitutes virtue, we act as virtuously in this 
tacit declaration of our insensibility, as if we had flown 
instantly to the aid of the sufferer, with the most compas- 

Religion of Nature Delineated, p. 18. London, 1738. 4to. 



i 



CLARKE AND WOLLASTON. 



73 



sionate declaration of our feeling ; or rather,, if, with the same 
indifference at heart, we had stooped our body, or stretched 
out our hand to relieve him, our very attempt to give the 
slightest relief, according to the theory of moral falsehood, 
would have been only a crime additional. 

Reason, then, as distinguishing the conformity or uncon- 
formity of actions with the fitnesses of things, or the moral 
truth or falsehood of actions, is not the principle from which 
we derive our moral sentiments. These very sentiments, 
on the contrary, are necessary before we can feel that moral 
fitness or moral truth, according to which we are said to 
estimate actions as right or wrong. All actions, virtuous 
and vicious, have a tendency or fitness of one sort or other ; 
and every action which the benevolent and malevolent 
perform, with a view to a certain end, may alike have a 
fitness for producing that end. There is not an action, 
then, which may not be in conformity with the fitnesses of 
things ; and if the feelings of exclusive approbation and 
disapprobation that constitute our moral emotions be not 
presupposed, in spite of the thousand fitnesses which reason 
may have shown us, all actions must be morally indifferent. 
They are not thus indifferent, because the ends to which 
reason shows certain actions to be most suitable, are ends 
which we have previously felt to be worthy of our moral 
choice ; and we are virtuous in conforming our actions to 
these ends, not because our actions have a physical relation 
to the end, as the wheels and pulleys of a machine have to 
the motion which is to result from them ; but because the 
desire of producing this very end has a relation, which has 
been previously felt, to our moral emotion. The moral 
truth, in like manner, which reason is said to show us, 
consists in the agreement of our actions with a certain 
frame of mind which nature has previously distinguished to 
us as virtuous ; without which previous distinction the 
actions of the most ferocious tyrant, and of the most 
generous and intrepid patriot, would be equally true, as 

E 



74 



OF HUME S SYSTEM. 



alike indicative of the real nature of the oppressor of a 
nation, and of the assertor and guardian of its rights. 

The fitness and the truth, then, in every case, presuppose 
virtue as an object of moral sentiment, and do not constitute 
or evolve it. 

The moral use of reason, in influencing our approbation 
and disapprobation, is, as I before remarked, to point out 
to us the remote good, which we do not perceive, or the 
elements of mixed good and evil, which also, but for the 
analytic power of reason, we should be incapable of dis- 
tinguishing with accuracy in the immediate compound 
result. If the mere discovery of greater utility, however, 
is sufficient to affect our approbation, utility must, it is 
evident, have a certain relation to virtue. Utility, it is 
said, is the measure of virtue. Let us consider what 
meaning is to be attached to this phrase. 



LECTURE V. 

OF HUME'S SYSTEM, THAT UTILITY IS THE CONSTITUENT OR MEASURE 
OF VIRTUE. 

In my last Lecture I examined, at as great a length as 
a doctrine so false in its principles requires, the system of 
Dr. Mandeville with respect to virtue ; a system in which 
the actions that commonly go under that honourable name, 
are represented as, in every instance where any seeming 
sacrifice is made to the happiness of another, the result of 
a calculating vanity that, in its love of praise, consents to 
barter, for a suitable equivalent of commendation, the means 
of enjoyment which it would not give without a due equi- 
valent, but which it values less than the applause that is to 
b e offered in purchase of them. The pretender to gene- 



of hume's system. 



75 



rosity, who is a speculator in this species of traffic, is of 
course a hypocrite by the very quality of the moral ware in 
which he jobs ; and the applauders of the ostensible 
generosity, who are as little capable of unpaid admiration 
as he of gratuitous bounty, are hypocrites of equal skill, in 
the supposed universal cheat of social life. All are im- 
postors, or all are dupes, or rather, all are at once impostors 
and dupes, dupes easily deceived by impostors whom it is 
easy to deceive. On a system, of which I may safely take 
for granted, that every one of you has in the delightful 
remembrances of his own breast innumerable confutations, 
I should not have thought it necessary to dwell, if there 
had been less peril in the adoption of it to happiness and 
virtue. As a philosophic system it is scarcely worthy of 
discussion. It is an evident example of an error that is 
very common in hypothetical systems ; the error of 
supposing, notwithstanding the most striking seeming 
contrarieties, that what is true of a few cases out of many, 
is therefore necessarily true of all. Some men are 
hypocrites, therefore all men are hypocrites. It is not 
absolutely impossible, that he whom the world honours 
as virtuous for a life, which, from youth to old age, has 
had the uniform semblance of regard for the happiness of 
others, may have no virtue whatever at heart ; therefore, 
it may be affirmed, with certainty, that he has no virtue 
whatever. Such are the two propositions, which, though 
not expressed in these precise terms, constitute truly the 
whole logic of Mandeville. They are the very essence of 
his system ; and unless we admit them as logically just, 
we must reject his system as logically false. But it is in 
his rhetoric that he trusts far more than in his defective 
logic ; and if he have given us a few lively picturings of 
hypocrisy, he natters himself that we shall not pause to 
inquire, whether pictures so lively are representations of a 
few only, or of all mankind. 

"What should we think of a moral theorist who, after 



76 



OF HUME S SYSTEM. 



painting some coarse debauch in the midnight profligacy of 
the lowest alehouse, or the wider drunkenness and riot of 
a fair or an election, should seriously exhibit to us those 
pictures as evidence of an universal conclusion, that all men 
are drunkards ? TVe might admire the verbal painting, 
indeed, as we admire the pictures of Hogarth ; but we 
should admire as little the soundness of the philosophy as 
we should have admired the accuracy of one of Hogarth's 
pictures, if he had exhibited to us the interior of a brothel 
as a representation of domestic life, a faithful sketch of one 
of those virtuous and smiling groups, that around a virtuous 
and delighted father, at his own parlour fire, seem to enclose 
him, as it were, within a circle of happiness ! It is certainly 
not more absurd to argue, that, because some men are 
drunkards all men are drunkards, than to contend that all 
men are, in every action of their life, indifferent to the 
happiness of every other being, because some may be 
hypocrites in affecting to regard any happiness but their 
own ; and he who, in adopting this theory, can seriously 
believe that there is not a single parent, or wife, or child, 
who has any other view than the selfish one of acquiring 
praise, in any one office of seeming kindness to those whom 
they would wish us to regard as dear to them, may certainly 
believe with equal reason, and admire as ingenious and 
just, the wildest absurdity which the wildest propounder of 
absurdities can offer to his assent and admiration. 

This system, by a little extension to all the sources of 
selfish enjoyment, and by a little purification of the selfish- 
ness, as the enjoyment is rendered less prominently selfish 
by being more remote and more connected by many direct 
or indirect ties with the happiness of others, assumes the 
form of the more general theory of selfish morals, in which 
the most refined virtue is represented only as disguised 
self-love ; though the veil, which is thin in itself, so as often 
to afford no disguise to the passion which glows through it, 
is sometimes thickened in so many folds, that it is scarcely 



of hume's system. 



77 



possible to guess what features of ugliness or beauty are 
beneath. Before considering, however, this finer system of 
moral selfishness, which is founded on views of remote 
personal advantage, and therefore in a great measure on 
the skill that detects those elements of distant good, I 
conceived that we might derive some aid to our inquiry, 
by considering first the relations which reason, the great 
analyzer and detector of those elements of distant good, 
bears to morality ; and consequently, as in their fittest place, 
those systems which would reduce all our moral feelings to 
intellectual discoveries made by that power, which is 
supposed, in these systems, to determine the very nature of 
vice and virtue, in the same way as it extracts roots, 
measures angles, and determines specific gravities, or 
affinities, or quantities of motion. 

We considered, then, two celebrated systems of this sort 
that found morality on reason ; one which supposes virtue 
to consist in the accommodation of our actions to the 
fitnesses of things, and another which supposes it to consist 
in actions that are conformable to truth. In both cases I 
showed you, that the systems, far from accounting for our 
moral feelings, or showing them to be the result of a process 
of ratiocination, proceed on the susceptibility of these feel- 
ings, as an essential part of our mental constitution, 
independent of every thing that can be resolved into 
reasoning. If we were not formed to love previously the 
happiness of others, and to have a moral approbation of the 
wish of producing happiness, in vain would reason tell us, 
after tracing a thousand consequences, that an action will 
be more generally beneficial than, but for this analytic 
investigation, we should have supposed. If we were not 
formed to love certain ends of moral good rather than 
certain other ends of moral evil, the mere fitnesses, or 
means of producing these ends, must be as indifferent to us 
as that indifferent good or evil which they tend to produce. 
If we have formed no previous moral conception of certain 



78 



of hume's system. 



duties, as forming that truth of character to which vice is 
said to be false, there will be as little falsehood, and there- 
fore, if vice be only a want of conformity to truth, as little 
vice, in the most cruel and unrelenting malignity, as in the 
most generous benevolence. In every case in which we 
suppose reason to be thus morally exercised, we must, as I 
said, presuppose certain feelings of love and approbation that 
constitute all which is truly moral in our sentiments of 
actions ; or the discovery of mere consequences of general 
good, mere fitnesses, mere truths, will be as powerless to 
affect us with moral regard, as a new combination of 
wheels and pulleys, or a new solution of a geometric 
problem. 

But, though the discovery of certain fitnesses or con- 
gruities, such as those of which Clarke speaks, or of a 
certain conformity to truth, such as that of which Wollaston 
speaks, or of the beneficial and injurious consequences of 
certain actions, considered as a mere series of consequences, 
discoverable by the understanding, like any other series of 
physical effects, may not be capable of giving birth to 
moral feeling, without some peculiar and previous suscepti- 
bility in the mind of being so affected ; may they not at 
least indirectly give birth to it, by presenting to this 
original susceptibility of moral emotion its peculiar objects ? 
Whatever may be the principle that develops it, does not 
the approving sentiment arise, on the contemplation of 
actions that are in their tendency beneficial to individuals, 
and thus to society in general, and only on the contempla- 
tion of actions that are thus beneficial ? Is not utility, 
therefore, since it appears to be essential, in some greater 
or less degree, to the whole class of actions that are termed 
virtuous, the constituent or the measure of virtue itself ? 

The doctrine of the utility of actions, as that which 
constitutes them virtuous, has been delivered with all the 
force of which the doctrine seems capable, by the genius of 
Mr. Hume, who has formed it into an elaborate system of 



of hume's system. 



79 



morals. It has ever since entered largely into the vague 
speculations on the principles of virtue, in which minds 
that are rather fond of theorizing than capable of it, are 
apt to indulge ; and we seldom hear in familiar discussion 
any allusion to the principle or principles of moral sentiment, 
without some loose reference to this relation, which that 
moral sentiment is supposed to bear to the utility of the 
actions approved. That it does bear a certain relation to 
it is unquestionable, though a relation which is not always 
very distinctly conceived by those who are in the frequent 
habit of speaking of it. It will be the more important, 
then, to endeavour to separate what is true in the common 
language on the subject, from the error which frequently 
accompanies it. 

Benevolence, as the very name implies, is always a wish 
of good to others ; and every benevolent action, therefore, 
must be intended to be of advantage to somebody. But if 
by the measure of virtue, when utility is said to be the 
constituent or measure of the actions that are denomi- 
nated virtuous, be meant that to which the virtue is in 
exact proportion, increasing always as the mere physical 
advantage increases, and decreasing always as the mere 
physical advantage decreases ; and if it be said that such 
actions only are felt to be meritorious, in which the agent is 
supposed to have willed directly that which appeared to 
him at the moment of his willing it most useful, and to have 
willed it with moral approbation for this reason only, 
because it appeared to him most useful ; utility, in this 
general sense, is so far from being the measure of virtue, 
that there is comparatively but a very small number of 
virtuous actions to which the measure can be applied, and 
very few, indeed, in which the proportion will be found to 
hold with exactness. 

That virtuous actions do all tend in some greater or less 
degree to the advantage of the world, is indeed a fact, with 
' respect to which there can be no doubt. The important 



so 



OF HUME'S SYSTEM. 



question, however, is, whether the specific amount of 
utility be that which we have in view, and which alone we 
have in view, in the approbation which we give to certain 
actions ; since this approbation is the direct feeling of 
virtue itself, without which, as intervening, it will be 
allowed that even the most useful action could not be 
counted by us as virtuous ; whether we love the generosity 
of our benefactor, with an emotion exactly the same in 
kind, however different it may be in degree, as that with 
which we love the bank-bill, or the estate which he may 
have given us ; in short, to use Dr. Smith's strong 
language, whether " we have no other reason for praising 
a man, than that for which we commend a chest of 
drawers." 

It may be necessary, in this discussion, to remind you 
once more, that virtue is nothing in itself, any more than 
our other general terms, which we have invented to express 
a number of particulars comprehended in them ; that what 
is true of virtue, then, must be true of all the particular 
actions to which we give that name ; and that all which we 
have to consider in the present argument, is not the vague 
general term, but some particular action, that is to say, 
some particular agent, in certain circumstances, willing a 
certain effect ; since the feeling which rises in the mind, on 
the contemplation of this particular action, is that which 
leads us to class it with other actions that may have excited 
a similar vivid sentiment, and to employ for the whole the 
common term virtue. The question then is, whether it be 
necessary to the rise of this vivid sentiment, the moral 
emotion of approbation or disapprobation, that we should 
have in immediate contemplation, as the sole object of the 
emotion, the utility or inutility of the action : and whether 
the emotion itself be always exactly proportioned by us to 
the quantity of usefulness which we may have found, by a 
sort of intellectual calculation or measurement, in the ac- 
tion itself, or in the principle of the action. It is the vivid 



of hume's system. 



81 



feeling of moral approbation alone, which leads us to dis- 
tinguish actions as virtuous or vicious ; and the supposed 
measure or standard of virtue, therefore, must relate to this 
vivid feeling in all its degrees, or it cannot have any rela- 
tion to the virtue that in all its degrees is marked by that 
vivid feeling only. 

If the utility of actions be their moral standard, then it 
must be present to the contemplation of the agent himself, 
when he morally prefers one mode of conduct to another ; 
and to the contemplation of others, when they morally approve 
or disapprove of his action. 

In every moral action that can be estimated by us, these 
two sets of feelings may be taken into account ; the feelings 
of the agent when he meditated and willed the action ; and 
the feelings of the spectator, or of him who calmly contem- 
plates tbe action at any distance of space or time. Let us 
consider, then, in the first place, the agent himself. The 
agent, indeed, may be under the influence of passions, from 
which the spectator is free, and may thus have his moral 
discernment less clear, so as to be hurried perhaps into 
actions which, with better moral vision, he would have 
shunned. But the principle of approbation itself is not 
essentially different in his mind, when the action which he 
contemplates is one which he meditates himself, and when 
he contemplates the action of another already performed ; 
and, if it be not according to any measurement of exact 
utility, that the approbation and consequent moral will or 
resolution of the most virtuous agent is formed, it must be 
allowed to be a powerful presumption at least, or more than 
a mere presumption, that the approbation of the spectator, 
arising from the same principle, is not the result of such a 
measurement of the good that is to be added, by that par- 
ticular action, to the general good of the world, or of the 
general utility of the principle from which it flows. With 
respect to the views of the agent, however, there seems to 
be little ground for dispute. His views, even when he 

e 2 



82 



OF HUME^S SYSTEM. 



seems to ourselves most commendable, but rarely extend to 
such general interests. The exact scale of utility of an 
action, in short, or of the principle of the action, is not 
present to his mind as the standard by which he regulates 
his conduct. Does the mother, when she hangs sleepless, 
night after night, over the cradle of her sick infant, think 
even for a single moment, that it is for the good of the 
society of mankind, that she should labour to preserve that 
little being which is so dear to her for itself, and the aban- 
donment of which, though no other being in the universe 
were to be affected by it, would seem to her a crime of 
scarcely conceivable atrocity ; and are we to refuse to her 
patience and tenderness, and watchfulness of regard, the 
name of virtue, because she has thought only of some little 
comfort that might possibly flow to the individual, and has 
not measured her own personal sacrifices with that general 
good, to which they should have been exactly adapted, nor 
estimated the general advantage of maternal love, as a prin- 
ciple of conduct which operates, and is continually to ope- 
rate, in all the families of mankind ? When we enter some 
wretched hovel, and see that wretchedness, which is so 
much more dreadful to the eye of him who beholds it, than 
to the ear of him who is told, in his splendid apartment, 
that there is misery upon the earth, — and who thinks that 
in pitying it, with the very idleness of pity, he has felt as a 
good man should feel ; when we look through the darkness, 
to which there is no sunshine, on some corner darker still, 
where the father of those who have strength only to hang 
over him and weep, is giving to them his last blessing, which 
is all that remains to him to give ; do we feel, on looking 
at this mixture of death, and sickness, and despair, and 
want, in dreadful assemblage, that it would be well for the 
world if a little relief were given to miseries so hopeless ; 
or that compassion, as a principle of conduct, is of the high- 
est usefulness, where there are so many sufferers on the 
earth, who may be objects of compassion ? Of the principle 



of hume's system. 



83 



of the action, in its relation to general utility, we never 
think. We hasten to do what it is in our power to do ; 
and we have already obtained looks of as much gratitude? 
as could be felt in a moment of such affliction, long before 
we have thought of any thing more than what was before 
our very eyes. In all the small courtesies of society as 
well as in these higher duties, we act, not from any estimate 
of the principle of courtesy as a general principle, but from 
the temporary views of individual gratifications to those 
who mingle with us ; and we act well. The amount of 
general good, which a philosopher might estimate, or at- 
tempt to estimate, by considering the relation of these par- 
ticular actions to the advantage of the community, never 
occurs as an object of contemplation to the multitude of 
mankind, when they approve or disapprove, with feelings 
at least as vivid as those of him who measures every action 
by its remotest consequences. It occurs but seldom, even 
to philosophers themselves, who may derive, indeed, an 
additional enjoyment from tracing that relation, and an 
additional reason to adore the goodness of him who has 
established it ; but who, in the common transactions of 
life, act from the same immediate feelings of approvable- 
ness, the same immediate impulses of virtuous emotion, as 
those to whom ethical and political generalizations are 
absolutely unknown. The immediate virtuous impulse is 
the mere feeling of rapid approbation, that becomes still 
more rapidly choice or determination ; a feeling which has 
relation only to the particular case, and which, far from 
pausing for any extensive view and measurement of remote 
consequences of utility, has arisen in the instant, or almost 
in the very instant, in which the action was conceived. 

But the feelings of the agent himself, whom alone we 
have yet considered, it may perhaps be said, furnish no 
decisive confutation of the supposed moral measurement of 
the virtue of actions, by the feeling of their precise degrees 
of general utility ; they may afford a presumption, but 



84 



of hume's system. 



nothing more ; and it is in the calm contemplation of the 
indifferent spectator, or reader, or hearer of an action only, 
that we are to look for the grounds of a just moral estimate 
of the virtue or vice which the action itself involves. 

The exclusion of the feelings of the agent himself, in the 
moral estimate of the propriety or impropriety of the 
actions which circumstances call on him to perform, and on 
account of which he is to be ranked with the virtuous or 
the guilty, may seem a very bold use of the privilege of 
unlimited supposition which a theorist assumes. Let the 
assumption, however, be admitted. Let the feelings of the 
agent be left wholly out of account, and let us think only 
of the feelings of him who contemplates the action of an- 
other. Is the approbation of virtue, in this case, the feeling 
of mere utility ? our indignation, disgust, abhorrence of vice, 
in its aspects of greatest atrocity, a feeling of nothing more 
than of the uselessness, or physical encumbrance and detri- 
ment to society, of that profitless thing which we call a 
tyrant or a parricide ? The doctrine of utility, as the felt 
essence of virtue, is in this case as little in agreement with 
the moral facts which it would explain, as in the case of the 
feelings of the agent himself; as little accordant with them 
as any false hypothesis in mere physics, with the stubbornly 
resisting physical facts, which it would vainly endeavour to 
reconcile, or at least to force together. 

If the approbation which we give to virtue be only the 
emotion excited in us by the contemplation of what is use- 
ful to mankind, it is very evident that such utility is to be 
found, not in the actions - only of voluntary agents, and in 
the general principles of conduct from which the particular 
actions flow,, but in inanimate matter also ; and indeed, on 
earth at least, it is only by the intervention of matter that 
one mind can indirectly be of any utility whatever to any 
other mind. Let us imagine, then, not a mere chest of 
drawers before us, — for that may be counted of too 
trifling convenience, — but the most useful machine which 



of hume's system. 



85 



the art of man has been able to devise, — a loom, for ex- 
ample, a ship, a printing-press, instruments which have 
certainly contributed to the happiness of the world a far 
greater amount of good than any moral action of any gene- 
rous benefactor, whose voluntary production of a little 
limited good, perhaps to a single individual only, may yet 
have excited in us the liveliest emotions of a regard that is 
almost veneration, or more than mere veneration. "When 
we think of any one of these noble instruments, as placed 
before our eyes, or when any one of them is actually before 
our eyes, and when we trace all the contrivances of its 
parts, and think of the good which has for many ages re- 
sulted, and will still continue to result from the whole, does 
it seem to us possible that any one should assert, or almost 
that any one should imagine, for a moment, the sameness 
in kind of the intellectual admiration, if I may so express 
it, which we feel in such a case, with the moral admiration 
that is excited in us by the patriot or the martyr ; or even 
by the humblest of those who, in their little sphere of 
private life, in the ordinary circumstances of peaceful 
society, exert, for the good of the few who are around them, 
an energy of active benevolence, as powerful as that which, 
in a more elevated station, and in a tumultuous age, en- 
nobles the leader and the sufferer in the cause of nations 
and of the world ? Our admiration of a steam-engine, our 
admiration of an heroic sacrifice of personal comfort, or of 
life itself, are feelings that can scarcely be said to have any 
greater resemblance than the brightness of scarlet and the 
shrillness of a trumpet ; and the blind man who asserted 
the similarity of these two sensations, was, I cannot but 
think, (if our consciousness is to decide on the comparative 
merit of the theories,) at least as sound a theorist as he 
who would convince us of the similarity of the two emotions. 
Indeed, if we were to strive to conceive all the possibilities 
of extravagant assertion, it would not be easy to imagine 
one less warranted by fact, than that which would affirm 



56 



OF HUME - ST 



that we love a benefactor exactly with the same feelings 
as those with which we regard a house or a loaf of bread ; 
or at least that there is no difference, but as one or the other 
may have been in degree more or less to us or to the world 
in general. 

If. indeed, mere matter could, by the most beautiful sub- 
serviency to our happiness, become a reasonable object of 
moral admiration, by what meat:? Lave we been able to 
escape an universal idolatry ? How is it that we are not, 
at this moment, all ad orers of that earth on which we dwell, 
or of that great luminary which renders our earth not habit- 
able merely, but delightful ? The ancient worshippers of 
the universe at least supposed it to be animated with a 
soul. It was the soul of the world which they adored. 
The savage, who trembles at the thunder, and bends before 
the whirlwind that knee which does not bow to man, 
believes that there is some being greater than man who 
presides over the awful darkness. But, according to the 
system of utility, the belief of a soul of the world, or of a 
ruler of the lightning and the storm, which even the savage 
thinks necessary, before he deign to worship, is superfluous 
for our more philosophic veneration. The earth, whether 
animated or inanimate, is alike that —hi oh supports and 
feeds us. The sun, whether animated or inanimate, is alike 
to us the source of warmth and light, and of all that infinity 
of blessings which these simple words involve. The earth 
and the sun, then, if mere utility were to be considered as 
virtue, the sole standard on the contemplation of which 
certain moral emotions arise, and by which we measure 
their vividness, are the most virtuous beings that come 
beneath our view ; and love, respect, veneration, such as 
we give to the virtues of the most virtuous human beings, 
are far too slight an offering of the heart to utilities so 
transcendent. 

It is evidently, then, not mere utility which constitutes 
the essence of virtue, or which constitutes the measure of 



of hume's system. 



87 



virtue ; since we feel, for the most useful inanimate 
objects, even when their usefulness is to continue as long 
as the whole race of beings that from age to age are 
to be capable of profiting by them, no emotions of the 
kind which we feel, when we consider the voluntary actions 
of those who are capable of knowing and willing the good 
which they produce. A benevolent man and a steam- 
engine may both be instrumental to the happiness of society; 
and the quantity of happiness produced by the unconscious 
machine may be greater perhaps than that produced by the 
living agent ; but there is no imaginary increase or diminu- 
tion of the utility of the one and of the other, that can 
make the feelings with which we view them shadow into 
each other, or correspond in any point of the scale. 

Though it is impossible for the theorist not to feel the 
irresistible force of this argument, when he strives in vain 
to think of some infinite accession of utility to a mere 
machine, which may procure for it all the veneration that 
is given to virtue, he can yet take refuge in the obscurity 
of a verbal distinction. Utility, he will tell us, is not in 
every instance followed by this veneration : it is only 
utility in the actions of living beings that is followed by it : 
and when even all the useful actions of living beings are 
shown not to produce it, but only such actions as had in view 
that moral good which we admire, he will consent to narrow 
his limitation still more, and confine the utility, which he 
regards as the same with virtue, to certain voluntary actions 
of living beings. Does he not perceive, however, that in 
making these limitations he has conceded the very point in 
question? He admits that the actions of men are not 
valued merely as being useful, in which case they must 
have ranked in virtue with all things that are useful, ex- 
actly according to their place in the scale of utility, but for 
something which may be useful, or rather which is useful, 
yet which, merely as useful, never could have excited the 
feelings which it excites when considered as a voluntary 



88 



of hume's system. 



choice of good. He admits an approvableness, then, peculiar 
to living and voluntary agents, a capacity of exciting cer- 
tain vivid moral emotions which are not commensurable 
with any utility, since no accession of mere utility could 
produce them. In short, he admits every thing for which 
the assertor of the peculiar and essential distinctions of 
virtue contends ; and all which he gains by his verbal distinc- 
tion of utilities is, that his admission of the doctrine which 
he professes to oppose, is tacit only, not open and direct. 

It is, indeed, by a verbal distinction of this sort, that Mr. 
Hume himself, the most ingenious and liberal supporter of 
this system, endeavours to obviate the force of the objection, 
which may be drawn from inanimate matter, as useful and 
yet incapable of exciting moral emotion. He does, for the 
purpose of saving his theory, what is not easy to be recon- 
ciled with the acuteness of a mind so subtile as his, and so 
well practised in detecting, or at least so fond of detecting, 
what he considers as illogical in the speculations of other 
writers, or in the general easy faith of the half-reasoning 
multitude. He fairly takes for granted, as independent 
of any measurement of mere utility, those very moral feel- 
ings which he yet wishes us to believe to arise from the 
perception of mere utility : thus abandoning his theory as 
false, in order that we may admit it as true. The utility 
of inanimate things, he says, does not seem to us virtuous, 
because it is not accompanied with esteem and approbation 
which are peculiar to living beings ; and he states this dis- 
tinction of the two utilities, without seeming to be at all 
aware that, in supposing a moral esteem and approbation 
distinct from the feeling of usefulness, he is thus presuppos- 
ing the very feeling for which he professes to account ; and 
denying that strict relation of utility to virtue, which his 
theory would hold out as the only standard, or rather as 
the, only constituent of virtue. The passage is too impor- 
tant not to be quoted in his own words. " We ought not to 
imagine/' he says, " because an inanimate object may be 



of hume's system. 



89 



useful as well as a mau, that therefore it ought also, accord- 
ing to this system, to merit the appellation of virtuous. 
The sentiments excited by utility are in the two cases very 
different ; and the one is mixed with affection, esteem, 
approbation, &c. and not the other." Now it is obviously 
of these very sentiments alone, which are said by Hume to 
be mixed with the feeling of utility, and not produced by 
it, that the moral theorist has to trace the origin. If the 
sentiments excited by the utility in the two cases be, as he 
most justly observes, very different, even when the amount 
of mere utility may be the same in both ; then, most indu- 
bitably, it is not as being useful that actions are counted 
virtuous, and rated in different degrees of virtue according 
to their different degrees of usefulness ; but on account of 
something that must be superadded to this usefulness ; and 
if, independently of the sum of good which they may pro- 
duce, and equally produce, one utility and not the other be 
attended with esteem and approbation, is not this a proof 
that the moral esteem and approbation are not commensur- 
able with mere physical usefulness ; that they are feelings 
of a peculiar class, which even he, who would represent 
actions as felt to be virtuous only because they are regarded 
as physically useful, is obliged to presuppose ; and that 
there is in virtue, therefore, an independent and peculiar 
appro vableness, or capacity of exciting " esteem and appro- 
bation," which utility is incapable either of constituting or 
of measuring ? 

In this argument, I have opposed to the actions which 
we feel immediately as virtuous, the utility only of inani- 
mate matter, bec?oise this furnishes a more striking contrast; 
but the same argument, as you cannot fail to have perceived, 
might have been extended to many qualities of the mind 
itself, in all those varieties of original genius, or of the rich 
endowments of science, that have progressively raised us 
from barbarism to civilization, with an influence on the 
happiness of the world, to which it is scarcely possible in 



90 



of hume's system. 



our conception to fix a limit ; of talents which we admire 
indeed, and honour with a respect of a peculiar kind ; but 
our respect for which, even when they exist in their highest 
order of excellence, we feel to be of a species very different 
from the moral esteem which we give to an act of virtue. 
The inventors of the printing-press certainly did more good 
to the world by that mere invention, than the Man of Ross 
himself by all his charities ; yet how different are the moral 
emotions with which we view them ! 

The mere usefulness of certain actions, then, I repeat, is 
not that which, as felt by us at the moment of our appro- 
bation, constitutes to us or measures their virtue ; it is not 
that which is immediately felt by the agent ; it is not that 
which is immediately felt by the spectator or hearer of the 
action ; and yet utility and virtue are related, so intimately 
related, that there is perhaps no action generally felt by us 
as virtuous, which it would not be generally beneficial that 
all mankind in similar circumstances should imitate. This 
general relation, however, is one which we discover only 
on reflection, and of which multitudes have perhaps never 
once thought during the whole course of their life ; yet 
these have esteemed and hated like other people. The 
utility accompanies, indeed, our moral approbation ; but 
the perception of that utility does not constitute our moral 
approbation, nor is it necessarily presupposed by it. 

I may remark, by the way, as a circumstance which has 
probably contributed, in a great degree, to this misconcep- 
tion of the immediate object of moral approbation, that in 
cases of political legislation, the very end of which is not to 
look to the present only, but to the future, we estimate the 
propriety of certain measures by their usefulness. That 
which is to be injurious we do not enact ; and those who 
contend that we should enact it, think it necessary to show 
that it will be for general advantage. Expediency being 
thus the circumstance on which the debates as to the pro- 
priety or impropriety of public measures in almost every 



of hume's system. 



91 



case depend, we learn to consider it very falsely as the 
measure of our moral approbation in the particular cases 
that are constantly occurring in domestic life. We forget 
that the legislator is appointed for the express purpose of 
consulting the general good, and of looking to the future, 
therefore, and distant, as well as to the present or the near. 
His object is to see ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat. 
His relation is to the community, not to any particular 
individual ; and in neglecting the general good for the good 
of a few, he would be guilty of a breach of trust, as much 
as the possessor of a deposit, if he were to give to the wants 
of some indigent sufferer, the money which another had in- 
trusted to his care. 

In the general transactions of ordinary life, then, our 
feeling of approbation or disapprobation, we may conclude, 
does not depend on the mere perception of utility. The 
virtuous, by the very constitution of Heaven, which has 
pre-established the connexion of virtue and happiness, will, 
indeed, that which is useful; but they will it, in each par- 
ticular case, without regard to the general utility of the 
principle of conduct to which their action conforms ; and, 
in considering the actions of others, we approve of that 
which is useful, but we do not approve of it because we 
have estimated, according to a scale of specific value, the 
mere usefulness of the general principle. We perceive a 
moral excellence, as something very different from the 
amount of physical advantage that flows from the particular 
action, or from all the similar actions of the same class ; an 
excellence which, of itself, constitutes the appro vableness ; 
a virtue which is independent of every thing but of the 
breast of him who conceived it ; which is not ennobled by 
success, and which becomes more interesting to us by the 
very misfortunes to which it may have led. 

The coincidence of general good, with those particular 
affections which are felt by us to be virtuous, is, indeed, 
it must be admitted, a proof that this general good has been 



92 



of hume's system. 



the object of some being who has adapted them to each 
other. But it was of a being far higher than man — 
of him who alone is able to comprehend the whole sys- 
tem of things ; and who allots to our humbler faculties 
and affections those partial objects which alone they are 
able to comprehend ; giving us still, however, the noble 
privilege 

To join 

Our partial movements with the master-wheel 
Of the great world, and serve that sacred end, 
Which he, the unerring reason, keeps in view. 1 

By this relation, of which few think or are capable of 
thinking, of particular good with public good, of general 
utility and private virtue, the public good is a? effectually 
ensured as if all were every moment thinking of the relation, 
and is ensured with a still greater accession and profusion 
of delight. 

" Happiness,'' it has been truly said, i; is best provided 
for by the division of affection, as wealth by the division of 
labour. Were all men to measure their actions by utility," 
the same writer justly remarks, "that variety of sentiments 
and passions which at present renders human society so 
interesting, and, like a happy combination of notes in 
music, produces an enchanting harmony, must be reduced 
to the dull monotony of one tranquil sentiment. Every 
man, it is true, would meet his neighbour with the mild 
aspect of calm philosophy, and with the placid smile of 
perfect benevolence: but no eye must be seen sparkling 
with rapture or melting with tenderness, no tongue must 
utter words of kindness, which have not first been exactly 
measured on the scale of universal benevolence. In 
short, the moral world would become one flat unvaried 
scene, resembling the aspect which the natural world 
would assume, were all its mountains and valleys levelled. 



1 Pleasures of Imagination, book ii. 



of hume's system. 



93 



and its whole surface converted into a smooth and grassy 
plain." 

That virtue is useful, is indeed true then ; so useful, that 
without it existence would not have been a blessing, but a 
source of misery ; and a society of mankind but a combina- 
tion of the miserable, labouring to become individually 
more wretched, by making each other more wretched. 
Yet it is not more true, that virtue is useful, than that this 
utility of the general principles of virtuous conduct is not 
the ground of our immediate approbation. It is not the 
standard of our approbation ; for we have approved, long 
before we think of that which is said to have been the 
measure according to which we have approved. This 
priority of the approbation in all its degrees, to any thought 
of specific utility, is true even of philosophers, who know 
that there is such a coincidence of the relations of virtue 
and usefulness ; but of all who feel virtue, who love and 
hate, who esteem, and honour, and despise, how few are 
they who know that there is any such relation ! They do 
not approve or disapprove the less, however, but it is 
because God has willed the happiness of the world, which, 
as a great whole, they are unconsciously promoting, not 
because they individually have thought of it. He, indeed, 
who fixed the relations of things, before the system of 
things itself was formed by him, established this paramount 
relation of our generous desires, to an aggregate of happi- 
ness far greater than that momentary benefit which was 
their particular aim. The good of the universe was the 
gracious object of his will, — his object, not more in the 
physical enjoyments which he has poured upon us, than in 
the virtues of which he gave us the noble capacity. But 
though it was for that universality of happiness, which the 
eternal Author of the universe alone could fully compre- 
hend in his conception and design, that man was rendered 
virtuous, our limited virtues themselves have their parti- 
cular objects, which they are better able to embrace. By 



91 



OF HUME S SYSTEM. 



their joint operation, they produce that great result, of 
which the j do not think even while they are most busy in 
promoting it ; intent perhaps only on courtesies and kind- 
nesses, which appear to terminate in the individual who 
receives them ; like the sunshine, that seems to be only 
flowing around the blossom in soft and brilliant varieties of 
light, while it is slowly and silently maturing fruits that 
are yet unseen ; or like the breeze, which seems only to 
flutter in the sail, or to dimple the wave before the prow, 
but which is at the same time wafting along the majestic 
vessel that is to mingle the treasures of every clime, to 
carry plenty to the barren soil, and the richer stores of 
science to the still more desolate barrenness of the mind. 



LECTURE VL 

EXAMINATION OF HUME'S SYSTEM CONCLUDED ; OF THE SELFISH 
SYSTEM. 

My last Lecture was employed in considering the relation 
which the utility of actions bears to our approbation of them 
as virtuous, 

That in acting, the agent himself, in cases in which no 
one would hesitate for a moment in terming him virtuous, 
except those who deny every distinction of vice and virtue, 
performs the action which is approved, without any regard 
to the amount of general good which would flow to society, 
if all men were to act as he acts, that is to say, without any 
regard to the specific utility of such actions, is evident from 
the slightest examination of human conduct. Of all the 
virtuous actions which are performed at any one moment 
on the earth, from the slightest reciprocation of domestic 
courtesies, to the most generous sacrifices of heroic friend- 
ship, there is perhaps scarcely one, in which this thought 



of hume's system. 



95 



of the supposed scale of utility, according to which his 
action is to be measured, is present to the mind of the 
agent, and is the influencing circumstance in his choice, the 
immediate motive which confers on his conduct the charac- 
ter of virtue. He is useful to the world, indeed, when he 
relieves the sufferings even of a single individual being. 
But he relieves that suffering, not because the world, if he 
gives the relief, will, as a whole, have less misery; or 
because it would be for the advantage of the world that 
others should imitate him in similar cases ; but that the 
individual before him may have less misery : or, if he think 
of any thing but that particular misery and its relief, he 
thinks only of the manner in which he would appear to him- 
self, if he were to abstain from giving the relief which is in 
his power. He bears sufferings of his own, in like manner, 
without lamentation ; not because a single groan from him, 
in any case of bodily anguish, would increase the misery of 
the world, or lessen its happiness, but because a single 
groan, though it might leave the happiness of the world 
precisely the same as before, would degrade him in his own 
estimation. Whether in doing or in suffering, therefore, 
his virtue, if any virtue be allowed to him, does not depend 
on his views of the general utility which the world derives 
from a frame of mind like that which his conduct displays. 
That comprehensive usefulness is not present to his mind, 
as a scale or measure of his virtue. 

But though it be not the precise measure of approbation 
and preference in his own mind, it may perhaps be the 
precise and sole measure of approbation, when his actions 
or patient sufferings are considered by other minds. In 
this case, too, we found that the supposed standard is far 
from being the real standard. We approve, not from any 
wide calculation of probable consequences to the world, if 
all were to act as the individual has acted, but from an 
instant feeling of moral excellence, which makes it im- 
possible for us not to approve, as soon as the action, in all 



96 



of hume's system. 



its circumstances, is known to us. If we think of the 
general utility of such a general mode of conduct, it is not 
before, but after the approbation ; and it is no paradox to 
say, that our approbation has, in truth, least reference to 
general conduct and general consequences, in cases in 
which the virtue of which we approve is greatest ; because, 
in such cases, the moral excellence produces- an emotion so 
vivid, as to preclude the consideration of every remote 
circumstance. The hero himself, bearing what he bore, or 
doing what he did, is all which our mind can see. Who is 
there, that, in the contemplation of Thermopylae, and of the 
virtues that have made that desolate spot for ever sacred to 
us, can think of Leonidas and his little band, without any 
emotion of reverence, till the thought occur, how useful it 
must be to nations to have defenders so intrepid ! Our 
admiration is not so tardy a calculator. It is instant in all 
its fervour; and, when we begin to think of the exact 
point in the scale of utility at which the action may be 
ranked, this very thought is itself a proof that our emotion 
has already become less vivid. The question, indeed, is 
one which our consciousness may decide in a moment, if 
we only trust to the evidence of our consciousness ; a sort 
of trust which, simple as it may seem, is no slight intellec- 
tual effort, when our consciousness is opposed to errors that 
are brilliant, and that have the authority of any great 
name. Our consciousness, if we appeal to it, will tell us, 
that to admire what is useful, and to revere what is 
virtuous, are feelings as different as any two feelings which 
are not absolutely opposite ; and that, if we class them as 
the same, we may, with as much reason, class as the same, 
and reduce under a single term, our moral veneration and 
our sensation of fragrance, because they are both pleasing ; 
or our admiration of what is useful, and our notion of a 
circle, because they are both states or feelings of the mind. 
Who ever looked on his conscience precisely in the same 
manner as he looked upon his estate ; and felt not regret 



of hume's system. 



97 



merely, but all the agonies of remorse, because bis acres 
were less productive thai* the richer fields of his neighbour ? 
We may respect the inventor of a machine, but we certainly 
do not respect the machine itself; though it is only in 
reference to the instruments which he invents that the 
inventor, as an inventor, has any utility ; and, even in 
respecting his intellectual talents as an inventor, though he 
may have contributed more by this one exercise of them, 
to the permanent happiness of the world, than all the 
virtues of all the multitude that existed around him at the 
time, do we feel for his new and beautiful application of 
the physical powers, the moral emotion which we feel for 
the humblest of those virtues ? It is enough, as I have 
said, to appeal to your consciousness on this point. If your 
reverence for virtue appear to you, as it cannot but appear 
to you, a feeling essentially different from your mere 
admiration of what is useful ; if, in short, you perceive that 
no addition of useful properties to any piece of inanimate 
matter could so alter it, as to make it an object of moral 
love ; that the philosophers stone itself, if it really existed, 
though capable of conferring inexhaustible wealth and 
eternal youth on its possessor, would yet be incapable of 
producing one feeling of cordial regard ; that all the stores 
of knowledge, and all the talents of the most vigorous 
intellect, unless accompanied with a generous desire of the 
happiness of those who profit by them, cannot excite the 
moral emotions that are excited so readily by the humblest 
benevolence; then, surely, you cannot hesitate for an 
instant in rejecting the theory, which supposes virtue to be 
felt as virtue only from its utility, from that utility which 
may be greater or less than the usefulness of external things 
or of qualities of the understanding ; but which, as mere 
utility, is precisely the same in its relation to our emotions, 
as the intellectual qualities of memory or judgment ; or 
as the house which shelters us, the coat which keeps us 

F 



98 



OF HUME S SYSTEM. 



warm, or the watch which tells us the hour and minute of 
the day. » 

The approbation which we give to actions as virtuous, 
then, whether we be ourselves the agents, or merely 
consider the actions of others, is not given to them simply 
as useful. Utility, in either case, is not the measure of 
moral approbation, the measure to which we must 
previously have adjusted the particular action, before any 
approbation of it can have arisen ; and with which, in all 
its exact gradations, the feeling of the rank of virtue 
exactly corres p o n i - . 

It may be said, indeed, that it is not mere utility which 
excites moral approbation, but the utility only that results 
from the actions cf living agents. This latter species of 
usefulness may be verbally distinguished from the other, 
as being that which is accompanied with esteem and 
approbation : and, indeed, this very distinction we find to 
be that which is made by 3Ir. Hume, the most acute 
defender of tl e theory which we have been examining; 
yet it is surel; very evident, that the verbal distinction 
thus made is an abandonment of the theory, an admission 
that there is. in certain actions of voluntary agent.-, some- 
thing more than utility which is morally admired by us ; 
since, in degrees of utility, they may be strictly commen- 
surable with other objects of thought that excite in us no 
such emotion. The esteem and approbation, which Mr. 
Hume rinds i: so easy to presuppose, are ail which it is of 
much eonsequen e. in any theory of virtue, to consider. 
They are in truth the very feeling of virtue itself under 
another name : the - very feeling, therefore, which he should 
have shown, not to be mixed only with our perception of 
utility, but to arise from it. or to be reducible to it ; and 
if, in accounting for our moral approbation of certain 
actions, as distinguished from our admiration of any useful 
contrivance ir mechanics, or any useful qualities of natural 
inanimate objects, or any excellence of mere intellect. — he 



of hume's system. 



99 



say, that, together with our feeling of the utility of the 
actions, there is a feeling of esteem and approbation, which 
distinguishes this usefulness from every other usefulness of 
the same amount ; he admits, in this very supposition, that 
there is in certain actions an approvableness which has not 
its source in the feeling of utility, — an approvableness 
which is independent, therefore, of the mere quantity of 
physical good produced; and that, when an action has 
been useful, is still necessary to convert utility itself into 
virtue. 

It is true, indeed, as we have seen in our review of such 
actions, that actions which are virtuous are actions of which 
the general principle is useful ; but they are virtuous and 
useful ; not felt by us to be virtuous, merely because they 
are of a certain rank of usefulness, as innumerable objects 
in external nature are in like manner useful, or many 
valuable qualities of the understanding. The coincidence 
in this respect, which the Deity, who adapted our emotions 
to the happiness designed by him, has, from his otyii 
universal goodness established, may be compared in some 
measure to that pre-established harmony of which the 
followers of Leibnitz speak. According to that hypothesis, 
the body and mind have an exact correspondence of motions 
and feelings, but are absolutely independent of each other, 
even when they seem most exactly to correspond ; the limbs 
running of themselves when the mind wishes them to run, and 
running faster or slower exactly as the mind wishes them to 
be more or less fleet; but having, in consequence of their own 
peculiar mechanism, a tendency to run so independent of 
the volition of that mind which longs to escape from the 
enemy, that, if the soul of the coward were, by a sudden 
miracle, to be annihilated, his legs would not run the less. 
Such a harmony the Deity has established of virtue and 
utility. That of which we approve as virtuous is, as a 
general mode of conduct, useful ; though it is not on 



100 



of hume's system. 



account of our estimate of its general useful tendency that 
we give it our immediate approbation. That of which we 
disapprove as vice, is, as a general mode of conduct, 
injurious to society ; though it is not on that general 
account we regard it with instant contempt, or indignation, 
or horror. By this adaptation of our emotions, however, 
the same advantage is obtained, as if we approved of virtue 
directly as useful to the world, in the same manner as we 
approve of any useful mechanical contrivance ; while it 
leaves us the enjoyment of all that far greater delight, which 
arises from the contemplation of the moral excellence of the 
individual, and from the love so infinitely surpassing every 
preference of mere utility, which moral excellence, and 
moral excellence only, can excite. 

It is this independent pre-established relation of virtue 
and utility, which, as I conceive, has rendered less apparent 
the error of the theory that would reduce moral approbation 
itself, to the perception of this mere usefulness ; and the 
illusion has certainly been aided in a great degree, by the 
circumstance which I pointed out in my last lecture ; the 
reference to the public advantage, in the enactments of 
laws, and the discussion of national measures of external 
or internal policy. These measures, to be virtuous, must 
indeed always have the public good in immediate view ; 
because the legislative and executive functions of the state 
are either expressly or virtually trusts for this very purpose ; 
and a neglect of the public good in those who exercise such 
functions has, therefore, all the guilt of a breach of trust in 
addition to any other partial delinquencies that may have 
been added to the crime. It is not very wonderful, 
however, that we should thus learn to extend to all parti- 
cular actions, what is true of those actions of general 
delegated power, which are the great subjects of temporary 
debate ; and should erroneously suppose all men in their 
little sphere to be swayed, when they are virtuous, by the 



of hume's system. 



101 



motives which alone we recognise as giving virtue to the 
actions of legislators, judges, or sovereigns, those actions 
about which all men speak, and which furnish so much 
nice casuistry to the political discourse of every day. 

Though it is not from calculations of general happiness, 
then, that we approve or disapprove in estimating the 
conduct of others, or our own, in many cases it will still be 
admitted that general happiness bears, not an indirect 
relation only, but a direct relation to our moral sentiments. 
The good of the world is not our only moral object, but it 
is a moral object. The sacrifices of mere personal advan- 
tage that are made to it, excite our regard ; the wilful 
violation of it, for purposes of personal gain, would excite 
our scorn or detestation ; but they excite these moral 
feelings not in any peculiar manner, as if primary and 
paramount. They excite them precisely in the same 
manner as sacrifices to parental, or filial, or conjugal 
affection, made without the slightest consideration of public 
advantage, give immediate rise to our delightful sympathies ; 
or, as the breach of any of the domestic duties, with 
circumstances of cruelty to the individuals injured, but 
without any intention of injuring the community or the 
world, awakes a wrath or a disgust almost as instant as the 
very knowledge of the injury. We should have loved our 
parents and our friends, though public utility had never 
been an object of our thought ; it is not quite so certain, at 
least it is not so manifest, that we should have loved the 
good of the world, if we had never known what it is to 
love a parent or a friend. For my own part, indeed, I do 
not doubt that even in this case, if our mental constitution 
in other respects had remained as at present, the happiness 
of mankind would have been an object of our desire ; and 
that we should have felt a moral disapprobation of any one 
who wilfully lessened that sum of general happiness, for the 
mere pleasure of giving pain. But still the passion for 
universal utility is not so manifest in every individual, 



102 



of hume's system. 



certainly not so vivid in every individual, as the private 
affections ; and if we were to judge from the feelings alone, 
therefore, it would seem a juster theory to derive our love 
of the happiness of the world from our love of the friends 
who first surrounded us in life, than to suppose that our 
early essential notions of virtue and vice, in the observance 
or neglect of the filial or fraternal duties, are measured by 
a scale of general utility which has never been present to 
our mind ; that general utility and virtue in our estimates 
of actions, are in truth convertible terms ; and that we 
should have felt no wonder or dislike, even of parricide 
itself, if we had not previously been enamoured of public 
usefulness, — enamoured of that good of the universe of 
which the good of a parent is a small elementary part. 

When the political moralist is said to correct our moral 
sentiments, as he unquestionably does often correct our 
views of particular actions, by pointing out to us general 
advantages or disadvantages, which flow more or less 
immediately from certain actions ; and when he thus leads 
us to approve of actions of which we might otherwise have 
disapproved, to disapprove of actions of which otherwise we 
should have approved, he does not truly alter the nature of 
our moral feelings ; he only presents new objects to our 
moral discrimination. From the mixture of good and evil, 
in the complicated results of almost every action, and from 
the innumerable relations which our actions bear in their 
results, not to the individuals alone, of whom alone we may 
have thought, but to others whose interest was unknown to 
us at the time, or unremembered in the eager precipitancy 
of our benevolence ; we may approve at times of actions of 
which we disapprove at other times, not because we hate 
the good which we loved before, or love the evil which 
before we hated ; but because the action, though seemingly 
the same, is truly to our conception different. It is varied, 
to our mental view, with every nicer analysis of its results ; 
and, in estimating the same apparent action, the new- 



of hume's system. 



103 



discovered compound of good and evil whieh we now love, 
is as different from that semblance cf mere evil which we 
before hated, as our love itself, as a present emotion, differs 
from our former emotion of hatred or disgust. 

Reason, then, even in analyzing compound results of 
good and evil, and showing us the relation which actions 
that are truly virtuous bear to the good of the world, is not 
the source from which our moral sentiments flow, that have 
admired and loved the virtue before its political advantages 
were pointed out, or even suspected. The conclusion to 
which we are led, therefore, with respect to utility, is, that 
it is not the scale which is present to the mind whenever 
we approve or disapprove, and according to which our 
moral emotions are in every case exactly graduated ; that 
though the good of the world is an object which we cannot 
consider, without feeling that the wish to promote it is a 
moral wish, it is not the only object which it is virtuous to 
desire, but one of many virtuous objects ; and that, if we 
are virtuous once, in acting with this single object in view, 
we are virtuous a thousand times, in acting without the 
slightest reference to it, with regard only to the happiness 
or distress of individuals, which we cannot consider without 
a wish to preserve the happiness, or to lessen the distress, 
— a wish which we should have felt in like manner, 
though, with the exception of the individuals of whom we 
think at the moment, there had been no world to be 
benefited by our wishes and our aid, or by the aid of 
those who, in similar circumstances, may act as we have 
done. 

The most important circumstance, however, with respect 
to the theory of utility as the essence of virtuous actions, 
is that which I remarked before, iu entering on this 
discussion, — that it does not profess to account for the 
origin of our moral feelings, but proceeds on our suscepti- 
bility of these as an undoubted principle of the mind. 
Why should I love that which may be productive of 



104 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



benefit to all the individuals of the world, more than that 
which would be productive of similar benefit only to one 
individual ? or, to put a question still stronger, why should 
I love that which would be of advantage even to one 
individual, more than that which would be of injury to 
every being but myself ? The only answer which can be 
given, even according to the theory which supposes all 
virtue to consist in utility, is, that it is impossible for me, 
by my very nature, not to feel approbation of that which 
is generally useful ; disapprobation of that which is in its 
general consequences hurtful. There is a moral principle 
— a susceptibility of moral emotion — that is a part of my 
constitution, with which I can as little abstain from approv- 
ing or disapproving, when I hear of certain actions, as I 
can abstain from simply hearing the words of that voice 
which relates them to me. 

The error which we have been considering at so much 
length, as to the identity of virtue and the general utility of 
actions, — though I must confess that it appears to me, 
notwithstanding the high authorities by which it has been 
sanctioned, an error of no slight kind, is yet an error which 
is not inconsistent with the most generous virtue ; since, 
though it assert utility to be the measure of our approbation, 
it does not confine this utility to our own individual advan- 
tage ; but gives to us, as a great object of regard, whatever 
can be useful to the community of mankind. It is a very 
different doctrine that makes the utility, according to which 
we measure virtue, in every case our own individual 
advantage. To the consideration of this doctrine, which 
is in truth only an extension of the principles of Mandeville, 
allowing less to the mere love of praise, and more to our 
other passions, — you may remember that I was about to 
proceed, after treating of the system of that licentious 
satirist of our nature, when I suspended this progress to 
make you acquainted with the general doctrines of the 
influence of reason on moral sentiment, and of the relation 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



105 



of virtue and usefulness ; as I conceived that my remarks 
on those doctrines would render more apparent to you the 
futility of the selfish system of morals. 

Virtue, according to this system, is the mere search of 
pleasure. It gives up one pleasure, indeed, but it gives it 
up for a greater. It sacrifices a present enjoyment ; but it 
sacrifices it only to obtain some enjoyment which, in 
intensity and duration, is fairly worth the sacrifice. In 
every instance in which it seems to pursue the good of 
others as good, it is its own gratification, and nothing but 
its own gratification, which it seeks. 

To this system, which, from the days of Aristippus, has. 
both in ancient and modern times, been presented in 
various forms, the remarks which I made on the system of 
general utility are equally applicable. We do unquestion- 
ably love our own well-being, our bodily ease, and that 
pleasure which is still dearer than ease ; but, loving our- 
selves, we as unquestionably love others ; and loving them, 
we cannot fail to desire their happiness, since the desire 
may be considered as the natural consequence of the love. 
In such cases, the immediate object of our desire — and it is 
this immediate object alone which we have theoretically to 
consider — is as truly the good of others, as our own good is 
our immediate object, when we wish for freedom from any 
bodily pain, or for the possession of any object which 
appears to us productive of positive pleasure. All of which 
we think, at the moment of the action, is purely benevolent; 
and the action, therefore, if justly designated, must itself be 
regarded as purely benevolent. 

There is, indeed, as I remarked in a former lecture, one 
very simple argument by which every attempt to maintain 
the disinterested nature of virtue is opposed. If we will 
the happiness of any one, it is said, it must be agreeable to 
us that he should be happy, since we have willed it ; it 
must be painful to us not to obtain our wish ; and with the 
pleasure of the gratification before us, and the pain of 

f 2 



108 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



failure, can we doubt that we have our own happiness in 
view, however zealously we may seem to others, and even 
perhaps to ourselves, to have in view only some addition 
to another's happiness ? This argument, though often 
urged with an air of triumph, as if it were irresistible, is a 
quibble, and nothing more. The question is not, whether 
it be agreeable to act in a certain manner, and painful not 
to act in that manner ; but whether the pleasure and the 
pain be the objects of our immediate contemplation in the 
desire ? and this is not proved by the mere assertion that 
virtue is delightful, and that, to be restrained from the 
exercise of virtue, if it were possible, would be the most 
oppressive restraint under which a good man could be 
placed. There is a pleasure, in like manner, attending 
moderate exercise of our limbs; and to fetter our limbs, 
when we wish to move them, would be to inflict on us no 
slight disquietude. But how absurd would that sophistry 
seem, which should say, that, when we hasten to the relief 
of one who is in peril, or in sorrow, whom we feel that we 
have the power of relieving, we hasten because it is agree- 
able to us to walk ; and because, if we were prevented 
from walking, when we wished thus to change our place, 
the restraint imposed on us would be very disagreeable. 
Yet this is the very argument, under another form, which 
the selfish philosophers adduce, in support of their miserable 
system. They forgot, or are not aware, that the very 
objection which they thus urge, contains in itself its own 
confutation, — a confutation stronger than a thousand 
arguments. 

Why is it that the pleasure is felt in the case supposed ? 
It is because the generous desire is previously felt ; and if 
there had been no previous generous desire, there could 
not be the pleasure that is afterwards felt in the gratifica- 
tion^ of the desire. Why is it, in like manner, that pain is 
felt, when the desire of the happiness of others has not 
been gratified ? It is surely because we have previously 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



107 



desired the happiness of others. That very delight, there- 
fore, which is said to give occasion to the selfish wish, is 
itself a proof, and a convincing proof, that man is not 
selfish ; unless we invert all reasoning, and sup23ose that it 
is in every instance the effect which gives occasion to the 
cause, not the cause which produces the effect. The 
virtuous man feels delight in the sacrifices which he makes ! 
unquestionably he does feel this delight ; a delight which 
he would not yield for any thing but for the knowledge 
that his sacrifice has been of the advantage which he 
desired to the friend for whom it was made, — if the loss of 
the pleasure which he feels could have been made a part of 
the sacrifice. The virtuous man is happy ; and if it were 
necessary for proving that he is not selfish, that we should 
show him to be miserable for having done his duty, the 
cause of disinterested virtue, I confess, must be given up; 
and, perhaps, in that case, if the attending pleasure or pain, 
and not the motive, is to be considered, the name of absolute 
disinterestedness might be appropriated to those whom we 
now count selfish — to him who deceives, and plunders, and 
oppresses, and finds no satisfaction in his accumulated 
frauds and villanies of every kind. Why does it seem to 
us absurd to say, that a wretch, who is incapable of any 
generous feeling, and who never acts but with a view to 
some direct personal enjoyment, is not to be counted selfish, 
because he derives no actual enjoyment from the attain- 
ment of his sordid wishes ? If it be absurd to say, that, 
in thinking only of his own good, he is not selfish, because 
no happiness has attended his selfishness ; it is just as 
absurd to say, that the virtuous man, in thinking of the 
good of others, is selfish, because happiness has attended 
the very sacrifices which he has made. The one is selfish, 
though not happy, because his immediate and sole motive 
was his own happiness ; the other is disinterested though 
happy, because, in acting, his immediate motive was the 
happiness of others. The more the benevolent live for 



108 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



others, the more, there can be no doubt, they live for them- 
selves ; but they lire for themselves in this case without 
thinking of themselves. Their great object is to make 
man happy, wherever the happiness of a single individual 
is in their power; and their own happiness they safely 
leave to Him who has not forgotten the virtuous, in the dis- 
tribution which he has made of enjoyment. It comes to 
them without their seeking it ; or rather, it does not come 
to them, — it is for ever within their heart. 

Even if virtue were as selfish as it is most strangely said 
to be, I may observe, that it would be necessary to form 
two divisions of selfish actions ; one of those selfish actions, 
in which self was the direct object, and another of those 
very different selfish actions, in which the selfish gratifica- 
tion was sought in the good of others. He who submitted 
to poverty, to ignominy, to death, for the sake of one who 
had been his friend and benefactor, would be still a very 
different being, and ought surely, therefore, to be classed 
still differently from him who robbed his friend of the scanty 
relics of a fortune which his credulous benevolence had 
before divided with him ; and, not content with this addi- 
tional plunder, calumniated perhaps the very kindness 
which had snatched him from ruin. 

■ A self there is, 

Of virtue fond, that kindles at her charms. 
A self there is, as fond of every vice, 
While every virtue wounds it to the heart; 
Humility degrades it, Justice robs, 
Blest Bounty beggars it, fair truth betrays, 
And godlike Magnanimity destroys. 1 

By what perversion of language is the same term to be 
given to affections so different ? The foreigner of whom 
Dr. Franklin speaks, who, on seeing the tragedy of Othello, 
conceived that all the emotion which the actor exhibited 
was for the loss of a handkerchief, did indeed form a theory 
1 Young's Night Thoughts, Night viii. 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



109 



as just as that of many very ingenious philosophers, when 
they would labour to convince us, that a little personal 
gratification was the only object of those who, in the dread- 
ful ages of Roman tyranny, followed their friend into 
exile or imprisonment ; or who, after he had nobly perished, 
still dared to proclaim that innocence, the very assertion 
of which was a crime, which the tyrant, who knew only 
how to pardon what was atrocious, and not what was 
virtuous, was, by the habits which he had wrought into 
the dreadful constitution of his nature, incapable of for- 
giving. 

If virtue be nothing but personal gain, what is it which 
we individually can hope to acquire from the virtues of 
others ? We surely cannot hope that all the virtues of all 
mankind will give us more wealth than is possessed by the 
wealthiest individual existing ; more power than is possessed 
by the most powerful ; more vigour of body and intellect 
than is possessed by the healthiest and the wisest. Let us 
imagine, then, all these promised to us, on the condition of 
our admiration ; let us conceive that some human demon, a 
Nero, a Tiberius, a Caligula, were to show to any one of 
us all the kingdoms of the world, and to say, " All these 
thou shalt have, if thou wilt but esteem me," — would our 
esteem arise at all more readily ? Should we feel, in that 
case, for the guilty offerer of so many means of happiness, 
a single emotion like that which we feel for the humblest 
virtue of one who, we know, never can be of any aid to our 
worldly advancement? If a virtuous action be in itself 
nothing, except as a source of personal gain, why, in such 
a case as that which I have supposed, does not our heart 
feel its sentiments of esteem and abhorrence vary with 
every new accession of happiness which is promised to us ? 
At first, indeed, we may feel a loathing for the tyrant, not 
because tyranny is in itself less worthy of approbation than 
the mildest benevolence, but because it may be more 
injurious to our interest. It would require no trifling 



110 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



equivalent ; but still, as it is only a quantity of injury 
which is dreaded, an equivalent may be found ; and, with 
every new bribe for our esteem, there is of course a nearer 
approach to this equivalent. Our abhorrence should 
gradually subside into slight indignation, and this into very 
slight dislike ; and this, again, when the bribe is increased, 
become at length some slight emotion of approbation, which 
may rise, with the still increasing bribe, through all the 
stages of love, through esteem, respect, veneration, till we 
feel ultimately for the tyrant, whose power is to us a source 
of so much happiness, all that devotion of the heart which 
we so readily yield to power that is exerted for the benefit 
of mankind. When we labour to think of this progressive 
transmutation of moral sentiment, while the guilty object 
of it continues the same in every respect, but as he offers a 
greater or less bribe for our affection, do we not feel, by 
the inconsistency which strikes us at every supposed stage 
of the progress, that affection — the pure affection which 
loves virtue and hates vice — is not any thing which can be 
bought but by that noble price, which is the virtue itself, 
that is honoured by us : and that to bribe us to love what 
is viewed by us with horror, or to hate what is viewed by 
us with tenderness or reverence, is an attempt as hopeless 
as it would be to bribe us to regard objects as purple which 
are yellow, or yellow which are purple ? We nay, indeed, 
agree, by a sacrifice of truth, to call that purple which we 
see to be yellow, as we may agree, by a still more pro- 
fligate sacrifice of every noble feeling, to offer to tyranny 
the homage of our adulation, — to say to the murderer of 
Thrasea Petus, M Tbou hast done well," — to the parricide 
who murdered Agrippina, M Thou hast done more than 
well." As every new victim falls, we may lift our voice 
in still L:uder flattery. We may fall at the proud feet, we 
may beg, as a boon, the honour of kissing that bloody 
hand which has been lifted against the he! pie H : we may 
do more ; we may bring the altar, and the sacrifice, and 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



m 



implore the god not to ascend too soon to heaven. This 
we may do, for this we have the sad remembrance, that 
beings of a human form and soul have done. But this is 
all which we can do. We can constrain our tongue to be 
false ; our features to bend themselves to the semblance of 
that passionate adoration which we wish to express; our 
knees to fall prostrate ; but our heart we cannot constrain. 
There virtue must still have a voice which is not to be 
drowned by hymns and acclamations ; there the crimes 
which we laud as virtues are crimes still ; and he whom we 
have made a god is the most contemptible of mankind ; if, 
indeed, we do not feel perhaps that we are ourselves still 
more contemptible. When is it, I may ask, that the 
virtue of any one appears to us most amiable ? Is it when 
it seems attended with every thing that can excite the 
envy even of the wicked, — with wealth, with power, with 
all which is commonly termed good fortune ; and when, if 
its influence on our emotions depend on the mere images 
of enjoyment which it suggests, these may surely be sup- 
posed to arise most readily ? It is amiable, indeed, even 
in such circumstances ; but how much more interesting is 
it to us, when it is loaded with afflictions from which it 
alone can derive happiness. It is Socrates in the prison 
of whom we think — Aristides in exile ; and perhaps 
Cato, whatever comparative esteem he might have ex- 
cited, would have been little more interesting in our 
eyes than Caesar himself, if Caesar had not been a successful 
usurper. 

It is in describing the retreat and disasters to which 
that last defender of Roman freedom was exposed, that 
Lucan exclaims, with a sympathy almost of exultation, 

Hunc ego per Syrtes, Lybiseque extrema, triumphum 
Ducere maVuerim, quam ter Capitolia curru 
Scandere Pompeii, quam frangere colla Jugurthse. 1 



1 Lib. ix. 598-600. 



112 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



"What proof can be imagined stronger than this, that virtue 
and the source of personal gain are not identical phrases ; 
since no accession of personal interest can make that a 
virtue which was before a vice ; nor any loss of personal 
interest make that a vice which was before a virtue ? If, 
in any physical science, a similar error were maintained, 
there is not a philosopher who would not instantly reject 
it. Let us conceive, for example, some one ignorant 
enough or bold enough to affirm, that the gravity of 
bodies depends on their quantity of heat. We should think 
that we had nothing more to do. for showing the absurdity 
of such an opinion, than to try the effect of increasing and 
diminishing the warmth of the gravitating bodies ; and, if 
we found the weight to remain the same during all these 
changes ; if we found one body to be warmer than 
another, and yet heavier ; colder than a third body, and yet 
heavier, we should think ourselves fairly entitled to infer, 
that warmth and gravity were not the same ; that a body 
might gravitate and be warm, as, indeed, every body which 
gravitates may be said to have some heat, as every sub- 
stance which is warm has some weight; but that the 
gravity did not depend on the warmth, and bore no 
measurable proportion to it. This, in external physics, we 
should think a sufficient demonstration. But, in morals, 
the sophist finds a sort of shelter in the indistinct concep- 
tions of those to whom he addresses himself. It is proved, 
as indubitable, that our admiration of virtue has no measur- 
able proportion to our feeling of personal profit which may 
be reaped from it ; that the profit may be increased, inde- 
finitely, without the slightest diminution of our abhorrence 
of vice; and the loss increased indefinitely without any 
diminution of our admiration of virtue. But, notwith- 
standing this demonstration, that virtue is conceived by us 
as something more than a mere source of personal eDjoy- 
ment to us, he still asserts that they are strictly synony- 
mous ; and renews, with as brilliant ingenuity as before, 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



113 



that sly logic, which would be irresistible if an epigram 
were an argument, and a series of epigrams a perfect 
demonstration. 

We have seen, then, that the admiration of actions as 
virtuous, is not affected by calculations of loss and gain, 
and must, therefore, be something more than that loss or 
gain which, in our calculation, we perceive to be manifestly 
increased or diminished. There is another demonstration 
which seems not less irresistible. If what we admire in 
the virtue of others be nothing more than its tendency, 
more or less direct, to our individual advantage, the rela- 
tions on which this tendency depends must be perceived by 
us before we admire ; and the discernment of these is not a 
simple and easy intellectual effort. The mind that is 
matured by long observation of society, and by profound 
reflection on those ties which make the action of one man a 
source of profit or injury to remote individuals, may, 
indeed, look with esteem on certain actions, and with indig- 
nation on others. Our love of virtue and hatred of vice, 
if they arise from such knowledge, must be in every case 
progressive as the knowledge itself, from infancy to old 
age. To relate to a child some action of cruelty, must be 
to speak to an indifferent heart, — to a heart which cannot 
have made these nice reflections, and which cannot, there- 
fore, feel what is not to be felt without the knowledge 
which those reflections give. Every nursery, then, exhibits 
a fair field for an experiment that may be said to be 
decisive ; and will the selfish moralist submit his theory 
to the test ? Will he take upon his knee that little creature 
which has, perhaps, scarcely felt a pain since it entered 
into life, which knows only that it has a friend in every 
living being that has met its eye, and which has never 
thought of its own misery as a thing that is possible ? Will 
he watch that listening countenance, every look of which 
is fixed on his own, as he repeats verse after verse of the 
ballad which describes some act of injustice and atrocious 



114 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



cruelty ; and will be expect to see no tear in those eyes ; 
to bear no sobbings when the misery is extreme ; to dis- 
cover no demonstrations of an indignant wrath, that thinks 
not of itself at the time, but thinks only of the oppressed 
whom it would gladly succour, of the oppressor on whom 
it would gladly inflict vengeance? It will be well for that 
child if, in the corruption of the world, be retain a sym- 
pathy with the good and the wretched, and a hatred of 
guilt, as ardent as he feels in those years of ignorance ; if, 
on learning the relations of virtue to his own happiness, he 
love it merely as he loved it when he never thought of the 
relation. 

The love of virtue, then, I conclude, is different, and 
essentially different, from the mere love of .selfish gain. It 
is an affection which leads us to esteem often what is 
directly injurious to us; which makes it impossible for the 
good man not to honour in his heart, as well as in the 
praise which might seem forced from him, the virtues of 
that rival by whom he is outstripped in the competition of 
public dignity, which gains from the commander of an 
army a respect which nothing can suppress, for the valour, 
and all the military virtues of the commander opposed to 
him; though these very virtues have disquieted him more 
than the vices of half a nation, though they have robbed 
him of repose, and, which is still worse, have robbed him of 
the gloiy, which was his great object, by bringing on the 
army which he has led in vain to successive fields, disaster 
after disaster. It is an affection which can find objects in 
lands the most remote ; which makes us feel delight in the 
£ood qualities of those who lived in ages of which the 
remembrances of their virtues are the only relics ; and 
which preserves to our indignation and abhorrence, the 
crimes of those whom the tomb itself, already in ruins, has 
rendered powerless to injure us. It is an affection which 
is itself the truest prosperity of him who feels it ; and 
which, when the virtuous man does truly seem to suffer 



115 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



what the world calls adversity, endears to him in his very 
afflictions, still more, that virtue, without which he might 
have been what the world terms prosperous. 



LECTURE VII. 

EXAMINATION OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM, AND ITS MODIFICATIONS, 
CONTINUED. 

A great part of my last Lecture was employed in con- 
sidering that theory of morals which would represent all 
the feelings that appear to us most disinterested, as only 
the results of selfish calculation ; the generous sacrifices of 
friendship as the barter of some good which we value less 
for a good which we value more, without any regard to the 
happiness of those whom it is our policy to distinguish by 
the flattering term of friends, but who are merely the 
purchasers and sellers of the different wares of wealth, or 
power, or honour, or sensual pleasures, which it is our 
trade, as human beings, to sell and buy. In that wretched 
exhibition which is made to us of the social intercourse of 
the world, the friendship of any one, as implying, in every 
instance, some stratagem or invention of deceit on his part, 
is, therefore, in every instance, to be dreaded and shunned 
far more than absolute indifference, or even perhaps than 
avowed enmity. Nor is it only common friendship which 
this system would represent as the simulation, and nothing 
more than the simulation, of the generous feelings that are 
professed. The virtues which gather us under the 
domestic roof in delightful confidence of affection, of which 
we never question the sincerity in others, because we feel 
it to be sincere in ourselves, when it prompts in us the 



116 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



kindnesses which we delight to receive, because we have 
known the delight of conferring them ; these gentle virtues, 
which almost consecrate to us our home, — as if, in the 
midst of that wide scene in which the anxieties and vices 
of the world may rage, it were some divine and sacred 
place, which distrust and fear cannot enter, — would be 
driven, by this cold and miserable sophistry, from the roof 
under which they delighted to repose, — if human folly 
could prevail over an influence so celestial, and if man 
could, indeed, become that wretched thing which he would 
so laboriously represent himself to be. In the tenderness of 
connubial love, which years of affection have only rendered 
more vivid, how many are there who, in their chief wishes 
of happiness, scarcely think of themselves ; or, at least, 
think of themselves far less as objects of exclusive interest, 
than as beings whose happiness is necessary to the enjoy- 
ment of those whom they delight to render happy ! This 
seeming devotion, we are told, may indeed be a selfishness 
a little more refined ; but it is, not less the growth or 
development of absolute and exclusive self-regard. It is a 
selfishness which sees and seeks its own individual good at 
a little greater distance; but, since it is its own individual 
good which alone, at whatever distance, it is incessantly 
wishing to see, and as incessantly labouring to obtain, it is 
still selfishness, as much when it pursues the distant as 
when it grasps the near; — a selfishness to which the 
happiness of those who appear to be loved, is as the mere 
happiness of another, — if we analyze our desires with 
sufficient subtlety, — far more uninteresting than the 
acquisition of the idlest gewgaw which vanity, with all 
its covetous eagerness, would scarcely stoop to add to its 
stores. 

The fallacy of this system, as I endeavoured to show you, 
arises chiefly from the pleasure which truly attends our 
virtuous affections, but which, though universally attending 
them, it seems to require no very great nicety of discrimin- 



OP THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



]17 



ation to distinguish as their consequence, not their cause. 
AYe have pleasure, indeed, in conferring a kindness ; but it 
is because we confer the kindness, and have had the pre- 
vious desire of conferring it, that we feel this pleasure of 
being kind ; not because we feel this pleasure, that we con- 
fer the kindness ; and if we had never been beneficent, we 
should as little have known the delight of beneficence, as 
we should have known what external beauty is, without the 
previous perception of the forms and colours of the objects 
which we term beautiful. It would, indeed, have been as 
just a theory of the primary sensations of vision, to say, 
that it is because we have a pleasing emotion in beholding 
the proportions and colours of certain forms, we see those 
forms and colours which excite in us the pleasing emotion, 
as, of our moral approbation or disapprobation, to say, that 
it is because we have pleasure in the performance and con- 
templation of virtuous actions, and pain in the contempla- 
tion and performance of vicious actions, we perceive that 
very virtue and vice, and form those very desires, virtuous 
or vicious, to which, as previously existing, we owe the 
pleasure and the pain that have resulted from them, not 
produced them, and that cannot even be conceived as plea- 
sure and pain, without necessarily presupposing them. In 
acting virtuously, we do what it is pleasant to do ; but it 
is not on account of the pleasure that we perform the action, 
which it is delightful to us to do, and almost as delightful 
to us to have done. Indeed, to destroy our pleasure alto- 
gether, nothing more would be necessary than to impress 
us with the belief, that the actions were performed by us, 
with no other view than to the selfish gratification which 
we might feel in thinking of them ; and with a total care- 
lessness as to the happiness of those to whose welfare the 
world conceived us to be making a generous sacrifice. If 
conformity to selfish gain were all which constitutes virtue, 
why should our pleasure in this case cease ? It ceases for 
the best of all reasons, that it arises from virtue, and can 



118 



OF THE SELFJSH SYSTEM. 



arise only from virtue ; and that in such a case, as there 
would no longer be any virtue, there would, therefore, no 
longer be any thing to be contemplated with satisfaction. 
Such is that gross and revolting system which would re- 
present all the seeming moral excellencies of the world, — 
every generous exertion, every magnanimous forbearance, 
— as one universal deceit, — one constant unwearied search 
of personal good, in which not a single wish ever wanders 
beyond that personal enjoyment of the individual. 

There is another form in which the selfish system may 
be presented to us, less unjust to our nature than that which 
we have been considering. It may be said, that we now 
do truly wish for the happiness of others, without any 
regard to our own immediate interest; but that we have 
become thus disinterested, by the very influence of selfish- 
ness, only because our own interest has formerly been felt 
to be connected with the interest of others ; diminishing and 
increasing with theirs in so many instances, that the love 
which was originally confined, and confined in the strictest 
sense of exclusion to ourselves, is now diffused in some 
measure to them, as if almost parts of ourselves ; that we 
have learned to value their happiness, however, only on 
account of the relation which it has been found to bear to 
ours ; but for which relation, as evolved to us more and 
more distinctly in the whole progress of social life, we 
should be absolutely incapable of a single wish for their 
happiness, of a single wish for their freedom from the 
severest agony, even when their agony was beneath our 
very view, and could be suspended by our utterance of a 
single word of command to him who waited in dreadful 
ministry on the rack or on the stake ; or at least, if, in such 
circumstances, we could have wished any relief to their 
torture, it must have been merely to free our ears from the 
noise of groans or shrieks, that, like any other noise, might 
be a little too loud to be agreeable to us. According to 
this system, the happiness of others is loved as representa- 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



119 



tive of our own, in the same way as any object with which 
our own pleasure has been associated, becomes itself an 
object of pleasure to us. Our virtues, therefore, arising in 
every case from the discovery of some relation which the 
happiness of others bears to our own physical happiness, 
are not so much the causes of enjoyment, as the results of 
it ; they depend, then, on circumstances that are accidental, 
varying as the accidental relations to our pleasure vary ; 
and, if they seem to us to have any uniformity, it is only 
because the circumstances of pleasure, on which they de- 
pend, may be regarded as nearly uniform in all the nations 
of the earth. Every where the parent, the wife, the child, 
must have been useful to the son, the husband, the father ; 
every where, therefore, these relations, as productive of 
happiness, or protection, or comfort, in some degree, are 
relations of love ; and every where, in consequence of this 
factitious love, there are corresponding factitious feelings of 
duty, filial, connubial, parental. 

This modification of the selfish system, as distinguished 
from the former, has at least the comparative merit of not 
being in absolute opposition to almost every feeling of our 
nature ; and since it allows us to be at present disinterested, 
and refers us for the period of absolute moral indifference, 
to a time antecedent to that which our remembrance can 
reach, it is not so easy to expose its falsehood, as to expose 
the gross and obvious falsehood of the system which ascribes 
to us one lasting selfishness, — a selfishness so unremitting 
as to be, not for the first years of our life only, but in in- 
fancy, in youth, in mature manhood, in the last sordid 
wishes of a long age of sordid wishes, absolutely incompati- 
ble w r ith any affection that is directly and purely benevolent. 
But though it may be less easy to show the inaccuracy of 
the view of the great principles of our moral nature, which 
such a modification of the doctrine of general selfishness 
presents, the view, which even this modification of the 
dcctrine presents, is false to the noble principles of a nature 



120 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



that, even in the sophist himself, is far nobler than that 
which his degrading sophistries would represent him as 
possessing. There are feelings of moral approbation, inde- 
pendent of all views of personal interest. The happiness 
of others is to us more than the representation of our own ; 
and the way in which it contributes most powerfully to our 
own. is by the generous disinterested wishes which it has 
previously excited in our breast. 

I trust it is superfluous for me to say, that, in contending 
for the independence and originality of our moral feelings. I 
Jo not cod tend that we are capable of these feelings at a 
period at which we are incapable of forming any conception 
of the nature and consequences of actions : that, for ex- 
ample, we must feel instant gratitude to our mother, or our 
nurse, for the first sustenance or first cares which we receive, 
before we are conscious of any thing but of our momentary 
pleasure or pain : and, far from knowing the existence of 
those kind hearts which watch over us, scarcely know that 
we have ourselves an existence which is capable of being 
prolonged. This blind virtue, it would indeed be manifestly 
absurd to suppose : but this no philosopher has maintained. 
All which a defender of original tendencies to the emotions 
that are distinctive of virtue and vice, can be supposed to 
assert, is. that when we are capable of understanding the 
consequences of actions, we then have those feelings of 
moral approbation or disapprobation, which, in their various 
relations to time, as present, past, or future. I suppose to 
constitute our moral notions of virtue, merit, obligation. It 
then becomes impossible fur us not to feel, that in giving 
pain, for the mere pleasure of giving pain, to one whose 
delight it has been to contribute to our happiness, we should 
do that which we could not contemplate without a feeling 
of self-reproach, — as we should have an opposite feeling of 
self-approbation, in every sacrifice which we might make 
of our own convenience, to the happiness or the comfort of 
a person, to whom our mutual services were so justly due, 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



121 



An action, I have already frequently repeated, is, as a moral 
object, not the mere production of good or evil, but the in- 
tentional production of good or evil. It has no moral 
meaning whatever, but as it is significant of the frame of 
mind of the agent himself, willing and producing a parti- 
cular result ; and where the frame of mind of the agent 
cannot be supposed to be known, or even guessed, it is not 
to be supposed that any moral feeling should arise, whatever 
susceptibility the mind may possess of being affected with 
certain moral emotions, by the contemplation of certain 
frames of mind of the voluntary producers of good or evil. 
There is a knowledge then of intention on which our moral 
sentiments unquestionably depend ; but it is only on this 
knowledge they do depend ; and it would be as absurd to 
refuse to them the appellation of original feelings, on this 
account, as it would be to refuse to the mind any original 
susceptibility of the sensations of vision, because there can 
be no vision till a luminous object be present, nor even then 
any distinct perception till we have opened our eyelids. 
There was, indeed, a period at which we had no moral feel- 
ings, as there was a period at which we had no sensations 
of colour ; but though we had not the actual feelings, from 
the absence of the circumstances which are necessary for 
producing them, we could as little be said to be blind to 
morality in the one case, as blind to all the splendour and 
beauty of light in the other. 

To, return, however, to that form of the selfish system of 
morals, which is under our review, I may remark, in the 
first place, that, as this theory of our affections admits them 
to be at present disinterested, and refers us for the period 
of exclusive self-regard, to a time of which the conscious- 
ness is absolutely lost to our memory, it would not be 
entitled to the praise of certainty, even though no objection 
could be urged against it. It would still be only an hy- 
pothesis, — and an hypothesis which, even by the confession 
of those who maintain it, supposes a state of our feelings 

a 



122 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



absolutely opposite to that which they have continued to 
display, during all that long period of our consciousness 
which we are capable of remembering. It is an hypothesis, 
all the burden of the proof of which must rest with the 
assertors of it, — an hypothesis which, even though it were 
just, it would be impossible to verify, — and an hypothesis 
which affirms the mind to have been, with respect to the 
very feelings that are attempted to be explained by it, the 
reverse of what is at present. But is there no other objec- 
tion which can be made to this system, than that it is an 
hypothesis only, which may, if we consent to admit it with- 
out proof, be made to tally with the phenomena ; but which 
the phenomena themselves do not at least very obviously 
appear to warrant us to frame % There is still another 
very important inquiry : Does it correspond, even as an 
hypothesis, with the moral appearances, which it is invented 
to illustrate ? 

We have moral affections, it is allowed, at present, which 
are disinterested ; but they have become so, it is said, in 
consequence of the association of our own past pleasures 
with their objects ; and our experience that the safety, and 
in some measure the comfort of others, — for whom, on their 
own account, we should be perfectly indifferent whether 
they be in health or disease, joy or misery, — are necessary 
to enable them to contribute most effectually to our happi- 
ness. We at last seek their happiness for their sake, 
because we have been accustomed to seek it for our own ; 
and the wilful violations of their pleasure or ease, which 
were regarded by us at first as inexpedient because they 
might be hurtful to ourselves, are at last regarded by us as 
immoral, when we have been so perfectly selfish, for a suffi- 
cient length of time, as to cease to be selfish, from the very 
force of our habits of selfishness. 

In opposition to this hypothesis, I need not repeat 
arguments which have been already urged by me against 
other false views of our moral nature ; and which, as not 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



123 



less applicable to this view of it, I flatter myself that you 
will have no difficulty in remembering and applying for 
yourselves. The nursery, to which I referred in my last 
lecture as the scene of an experiment that might be con- 
sidered as decisive with respect to the theory of universal 
selfishness, would be equally valuable for a similar experi- 
ment in the present instance, as to that selfishness, which, 
though not universal during the whole course of life, is said 
to be universal at least during childhood. Such an experi- 
ment, indeed, would be still more valuable in the present 
instance, as allowing us the nearest approach which we can 
make to the time at which the mysterious transmutation of 
selfishness into disinterested affection is supposed to begin 
to take place. If all actions which do not immediately 
affect our own means of physical well-being be originally 
indifferent to us, and if we learu only by the relations of 
certain actions to this physical well-being, to regard one 
species of conduct as virtuous, and another species of 
conduct as vicious, the child, whose never-failing enjoy- 
ments have seemed to him to form a regular part of the 
day, almost like the hours which compose it, who expects 
to find to-morrow what he found yesterday, and who as 
little thinks that he is indebted to any one for the regular 
food which gratifies his appetite, or the garments which 
keep him warm, or the little couch on which he lies down 
happy, to awake happy next morning, as he thinks that he 
is indebted to any of those around him for the sunny 
radiance which shines on him, or for the air which he 
breathes without knowing that he is breathing it ; while he 
lives among smiles and caresses, and regards even these, 
not as marks of indulgence, but only as proofs of the mere 
presence of those whose very countenance is love. The 
little reasoner on his own comforts, and disregarder of all 
comforts but his own, may indeed be beginning to form the 
inductions which are to terminate in the belief, that the 
happiness of others may be instrumental to his happiness ; 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



and that the universe would suffer, and consequently 
himself, as a part of the universe, be in danger of suffering 
by the spreading and multiplying relations of guilt to guilt, 
if an instance of rapacity or cruelty were to occur in some 
obscure cottage in a distant kingdom. But though he may 
be beginning to make this philosophic analysis and generali- 
zation of the remote relations of things, by which crimes 
perpetrated in the most remote part of the world, and of a 
kind from which he has never suffered, may be conceived 
by him to have ultimately some relation to his own selfish 
enjoyment, he is surely ouly beginning to make them. His 
selfishness is not of sufficient growth to have ceased to be 
selfish; and his morality, therefore, if morality be the 
result of fine inductions, which show the good of others to 
be in some measure representative of our own, cannot have 
begun to be developed. When he quits his sport, therefore, 
to listen to the tale which his nurse has promised him, 
suspending not this particular exercise only, but the very 
activity that would be every moment urging him to nevr 
exercise, as he remains fixed at her knee in a state of quiet 
of 3Teiy limb, that but for the delightful horrors which he 
hears and expects to hear, would be too powerful to be 
borne ; if there be no disinterested affection then, or at 
least only the faint dawning of such affections, the tale 
which is related to him, however full it may be of injustice 
and cruelty, cannot have any powerful influence on his 
feelings. His love of novelty, indeed, may be gratified by 
the adventures of the generous warrior, who, at the peril of 
his own life, attacked the castle of the giant, and opened at 
last, to give liberty to a hundred trembling prisoners, those 
dungeon gates which had never before been opened but to 
fling some new wretch to the living heap of wretchedness, 
or out of the heap already gathered, to select some one for 
torture and death. He may listen to such a marvellous tale 
as he would listen to any thing else that is equally 
marvellous ; but it is only as marvellous that he can be 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



125 



supposed to listen to it. There is no generous interest in 
virtue to be gratified in his little heart, because, in his state 
of secure and tranquil enjoyment, he has had too little 
experience of the relations of things to know that vice and 
virtue have that great difference — their only difference — 
which consists in their likelihood of being of greater or less 
advantage or disadvantage to him. In hearing of the 
deliverance of the good, and of the punishment of the wicked, 
he should have no thought but of the wonderful things 
which he is to hear next. In short, according to the system 
which would represent all virtue to be of selfish growth, he 
should be that cold and indifferent creature which no nursery 
has ever seen ; and which, if every nursery saw in those 
who are to furnish the mature population of other years, 
the earth would soon be an unpeopled waste, or, at best, a 
prison-house of the rapacious and the cruel. 

If, without having heard of any hypotheses on the 
subject, we were told that there is a period of the life of 
man in which a tale of cruelty may be related to him, and 
understood, without exciting any emotion, and in which the 
intentional producer of misery, who produces it in the mere 
wantonness of power, only that he may have the delight 
of thinking that he has produced it, and the mild and 
unrepining sufferer whom he has made his victim, are 
regarded with equal indifference, is it to his early years 
that we all should look in making our reference ? or, 
rather, is there not reason to think, that at least an equal 
number of the estimators of different ages would look to 
years, when, if generous affections were the result of 
experience, and grew more purely disinterested, as the 
experience of the relations of things extended over a 
larger portion of life, there could not be one sordid and 
selfish wish remaining with its ancient dominion in the 
heart ? 

But, omitting every objection that may be drawn from 
the appearances of lively moral feeling, at a time when, 



126 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



according to the hypothesis of original insensibility to every 
distinction of virtue and. vice, there could be no moral 
feeling of any kind, what, I may ask, is the nature of the 
change which is supposed to take place in this purification 
of selfish desires, and are the circumstances assigned as the 
cause of the purification sufficient to produce it ? We are 
absolutely regardless of the happiness or misery of others ; 
and the actions that would lead to their happiness or misery 
seem to us to have those different physical tendencies, but 
are regarded by us only as physically different. Such is 
said to be the state of the mind at one period. Afterwards 
we learn to look on others with regard, in consequence of 
the pleasure which has flowed from them, or attended their 
presence ; and not to look on them with disinterested 
regard only, and to wish their happiness, but, which is a 
much more important circumstance, to feel that the neglect 
or violation of their happiness would be attended with 
feelings of self-reproach on our part, essentially different 
from mere regret. The explanation proposed might, 
perhaps, be thought to account for the affection which we 
acquire for persons as well as for things that were pre- 
viously indifferent to us ; and even for our wish to add to 
the happiness of those whom we love, since there scarcely 
can be affection without such a wish. But the sense of duty 
is something more than this consciousness of mere affection 
and of kind wishes. When we have failed to act in 
conformity with it, we have not a mere feeling of mis- 
fortune, as when we have failed in any wish, the success of 
which did not depend on ourselves ; but a moral feeling of 
self-disapprobation, for which the growth of mere affection, 
and of all the wishes to which affection can give rise, is 
insufficient to account. Here, then, is the important 
transition which should be explained, that by which w r e 
pass from love that is factitious, to a feeling of duty that is 
factitious. It is this feeling of moral approbation or 
disapprobation, — the difference of common regret from 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



127 



remorse, — of common joy from the delightful complacencies 
of virtue, — which is the real subject in controversy ; and 
this feeling the selfish system, even in that best modification 
of it which we are considering, leaves wholly unexplained. 
It asserts us to be selfish, but it does not show, nor even 
profess to show, how we are thus selfish with notions of 
morality. 

It must never be forgotten, in estimating any theory of 
morals, that it is not a mere quantity of pleasure or pain, 
love or dislike, for which the theorist has to account ; but 
an order of moral notions, pleasant, indeed, in certain 
references to ourselves or others, painful in certain other 
references, yet essentially distinct from any varieties of 
mere physical delight or uneasiness. It is not the joy of a 
prosperous man for which he has to give a reason, but the 
complacency of a good conscience ; not the regret of one 
who has formed wishes of dignified station or wealth that 
are ungratified, but the remorse of one who has formed 
guilty wishes, and whose chief misery, perhaps, arises from 
the gratification of the very wishes which he had formed. 
It is not the mere wish of contributing to the happiness of 
those whom we love, but the feeling of obligation to 
contribute to their happiness, — and often even to contribute 
to the happiness of individuals for whom we feel no peculiar 
tenderness of regard. For these peculiar feelings, however, 
for all that can strictly be said to be moral in love, or even 
in morality itself, the assertors of the selfish system do not 
think it necessary to assign any reason, though it is of these 
only that any explanation is required : and yet they speak 
of their system as if it were a theory, not of mere pleasure 
or pain, love or dislike, but of all the phenomena of moral 
sentiment. They think that they have shown enough, if 
they have shown how we may love our friends that live 
around us as we love our house or our estate ; and if they 
can account for this mere affection, they take for granted 



128 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



that our feelings of duty, virtue, obligation, and all the 
moral feelings of conscience, follow of course. 

Even with respect to mere affection, unimportant as this 
is, in a theory of morals, when considered as mere affection, 
exclusively of all feeling of duty or moral approbation, — the 
cause assigned for the production and extension of this 
regard is far from being shown to be adequate. It is a 
cause which connects us only with a few individuals, and 
which is yet adduced as explanatory of feelings that are 
extended in vivid diffusion to all mankind. The associating 
principle is the cause to which we are directed, — that 
principle which attaches a high interest to objects that 
might be considered as in themselves almost indifferent, — 
a snuff-box, a cane, or any other inanimate thing, which 
had long been our companion. But though this sort of 
companionship may render our own cane important to us, 
as if it were a symbol of our happiness, like the white 
wands and gold sticks that are symbols of the dignity of 
office, this love of our own cane does not render every other 
walking-stick, which we may see in a shop, or in the hands 
of others, of much greater value, in our conception, than 
if we had been in the habit of walking without any 
support. If then it be, as is asserted, precisely in the 
same manner that we acquire our affection for the living 
beings around us, — who, otherwise, would have been as 
indifferent to our regard, as it is possible for a snuff-box 
or a cane to be, — why is not the effect confined, or nearly 
confined, to those immediately around us, with whom the 
associations of pleasure have been formed? Beyond the 
circle to which the magic of association spreads, every 
thing should be as before, or at least very nearly as before. 
For the stranger, whom we have never seen, in the same 
manner as for the snuff-box of another, we should retain 
feelings that scarcely pass beyond indifference ; and should 
as little look with affection on all mankind, in consequence 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



129 



of the pleasure which has attended our intimacy with a 
f ew — if affection be in itself foreign to our nature, and the 
result of factitious circumstances, — as we should look with 
a covetous eye on every walking-stick, because we should 
feel sorrow, far beyond its intrinsic worth, on the loss of 
our own. If, indeed, man* be naturally more precious to 
our affection than the paltry baubles of a toyshop, we may 
suppose, in his case, a more extensive diffusion of every 
feeling of regard. But to ascribe to man any original title 
to our love, independent of the use which we may learn to 
derive from him, as from a machine that may be instru- 
mental to our convenience, would be to abandon the very 
principle on which the whole strange system of moral 
selfishness is founded. 

Even as a theory, then, of mere affection, the selfish 
theory is inadequate. But however widely affection may 
be supposed to be spread, in consequence of the association 
and ready suggestion of pleasures received from a few 
individuals only — though it were admitted, that, by the 
remembrance of these, we might be led to love all the 
individuals of mankind, and loving them, to wish their 
happiness, it must still be remembered, that the only 
influence of affection, as mere affection, is to render the 
happiness of others desirable, like the attainment of any 
other object of desire. Instead of wishing merely the 
gratification of our sensual appetities, of our intellectual 
curiosity, of our ambition, we have now other wishes to 
mingle with these, that relate to the happiness of others ; 
and we may regret that the happiness of others has not 
been produced by certain actions, in the same way as we 
may regret that we have not attained the objects of any of 
our other wishes — that we are not the possessors of a 
fortunate ticket in the lottery, or have not had the majority 
of votes in an election to some office of honour or emolu- 
ment. But joy and regret are all which we can feel, even 
in love itself; and obligation, virtue, merit, the self- 

G 2 



130 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



complacency or remorse of conscience, are as little 
explained by the growth of mere love and hatred, as if 
every object of these affections had remained indifferent 
to us. 

We have considered, then, the selfish system in two 
aspects : first, as it represents mankind as universally, in 
every hour and minute of their waking existence, intent 
on one sole object, their own convenience ; incapable of 
feeling any disinterested affection for another ; and there- 
fore, when appearing to wish the happiness of a father, or 
wife, or son, or friend, wishing at heart only their own. 
We have afterwards considered that less sordid modification 
of the system, which supposes us, indeed, to have been 
originally as selfish as the other represents us to be for the 
whole course of our life ; but which does a little more 
justice to the feelings of our maturer years, by admitting 
that we become susceptible of affections that prompt us to 
act, even when our own convenience is not the immediate 
object before our eyes ; and in our examination of both 
forms of the doctrine, we have seen how incapable it is of 
explaining those notions of obligation, virtue, merit, that 
constitute the moral phenomena, which a theory that 
professes to be a theory of morals, ought as little to omit, 
as a theory of light to omit all notice of the radiant fluid, 
the properties of which it professes to examine, while it 
confines its attention to the forms of the mirrors or lenses 
which variously reflect or transmit it. 

After these two lights, in which the system commonly 
distinguished by the name of the Selfish System of morals 
has been considered by us, there remains still one other 
light in which it is to be viewed ; that in which the obliga- 
tion of virtue is supposed to consist merely in an exclusive 
regard to our own individual eternity of happiness in 
another life ; and virtue itself to consist in obedience to the 
will of the Supreme Being ; not on account of the moral 
excellence of that Supreme Being, or of his bounty to us, 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



131 



which might seem of itself to demand compliances, that are 
the only possible expressions of the gratitude of dependent 
creatures, to him from whom their power as well as their 
happiness is derived, but without any such views of 
reverence or gratitude, at least without any such views as 
are in the slightest degree necessary to the virtue of their 
motives, merely on account of the power which the Ruler 
of the universe possesses, to give or withhold the happiness 
which is our only object. This form of the selfish system, 
which has been embraced by many theological writers of 
undoubted piety and purity, is notwithstanding, I cannot 
but think, as degrading to the human character as any 
other form of the doctrine of absolute selfishness ; or 
rather, it is in itself the most degrading of all the forms 
which the selfish system can assume ; because, while the 
selfishness which it maintains is as absolute and unremitting, 
as if the objects of personal gain were to be found in the 
wealth or honours or sensual pleasures of this earth ; this 
very selfishness is rendered more offensive, by the noble 
image of the Deity which is continually presented to our 
mind, and presented in all his benevolence, not to be loved, 
but to be courted with a mockery of affection. The 
sensualist of the common system of selfishness, who never 
thinks of any higher object in the pursuit of the little 
pleasures which he is miserable enough to regard as happi- 
ness, seems to me, even in the brutal stupidity in which he 
is sunk, a being more worthy of esteem than the selfish of 
another life ; to whose view God is ever present, but who 
view him always only to feel constantly in their heart, that 
in loving him who has been the dispenser of all the blessings 
which they have enjoyed, and who has revealed himself in 
the glorious character of the diffuser of an immortality of 
happiness, they love not the giver himself, but only the 
gifts which they have received, or the gifts that are 
promised. Yet, such is the influence of the mere admission 
of the being of a God, and of the images of holiness and 



1S2 



of paley's system. 



delight which that divine name is sufficient to suggest, that 
while the common system of the universal selfishness of 
virtue has been received by the virtuous themselves with 
an indignant horror, that was itself almost a confutation of 
the system, the equally universal selfishness of the doctrine 
of these theological moralists has been received, not merely 
without any emotion of disgust, but with the approbation 
and assent of no small portion of those who, in opposition to 
the very doctrine which they have embraced, are truly in 
their hearts disinterested lovers of man, and equally disin- 
terested lovers and worshippers of God. 

The doctrine of the absolute selfishness of our homage to 
God, and of our social virtues, considered as the mere 
conformity of our wills to the command of him who is the 
dispenser of eternal happiness and eternal misery, for the 
sole reason of his power of thus dispensing happiness or 
misery, and not on account of his own transcendent 
excellence, that of itself might seem to demand such a 
conformity, is a doctrine of very old date. But the writer 
who in modern times has led to the widest diffusion of this 
doctrine, is Archdeacon Paley, the most popular of all our 
ethical writers ; and one of the most judicious in the mere 
details of ethics, however false and dangerous I consider 
his leading doctrines to be. Virtue he defines to be, " the 
doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, 
and for the sake of everlasting happiness." 1 The last 
part of the definition is the most important part of the 
whole ; for, the knowledge of this everlasting happiness he 
supposes to be all which constitutes moral obligation; 
meaning by obligation, not any feeling of moral love, but 
the influence of happiness as an object of physical desire, 
and of pain as an object of physical aversion ; one or other 
of which is to follow our obedience or disobedience to the 
command of the Power who is the supreme dispenser of 

1 Moral and Political Philosophy, book i. chap. vii. 



of paley's system. 



both. The will of God is our rule, he says, but " private 
happiness is our motive," and therefore our obligation. In 
short, the inducement or temptation to be virtuous, which 
is all that constitutes our obligation to be virtuous, is 
precisely of the same kind with the inducements or tempta- 
tions to vice, which may be said in like manner to constitute 
an obligation to be vicious. The only difference is, that a 
good man — that is to say, a person whom we distinguish by 
the flattering title of good — is more prudent than those 
whom we have chosen to denominate wicked. Both act 
from an obligation which may be said to be moral in one 
case as much as in the other; since in neither is disin- 
terestedness of affection necessary to virtue ; and in both 
there is that desire of pleasure which is sufficient to consti- 
tute an inducement, and therefore, in his acceptation of the 
word, which he regards as synonymous with inducement, an 
obligation. 

That we have a moral sentiment of obligation, virtue, 
merit, which is very different from the mere inducements 
of pleasure near or remote, I surely need not attempt to 
demonstrate to you, after the remarks already made on the 
selfish system in general. The doctrine of Paley differs, 
as you perceive, from the general selfish system, only by 
the peculiar importance which it very justly gives to 
everlasting happiness and misery, when compared with the 
brief pains or pleasures of this life. In the scale of selfish 
gain, it is a greater quantity of physical enjoyment which 
it has in view. It is a sager selfishness, but it is not less 
absolute selfishness which it maintains ; and it is therefore 
subject to all the objections which I urged before at great 
length, and which it would now therefore be idle to 
repeat. 

One great answer obviously presents itself to all those 
selfish systems which, convert the whole of virtue into 
prudence ; and make the differences of virtue and vice in 
every respect precisely the same in kind, as those of 



134 



OF paley's system. 



speculators in the market of commerce, who have employed 
their capital more or less advantageously, in the different 
bargains that have been offered to them. All those systems 
are, of course, intended to be faithful pictures of our feelings. 
The virtue which they profess to explain is the virtue which 
we feel ; and if we felt no moral approbation of certain 
actions, no moral disapprobation of certain other actions, it 
would be manifestly absurd to speak of virtue or of vice. 
It is to our consciousness, then, that we must look for 
determining the fidelity of the picture ; and what features 
does our consciousness exhibit ? If two individuals were to 
expose themselves to the same peril, for the same common 
friend, — and if we could be made to understand, that the 
one had no other motive for this apparently generous 
exposure, than the wish of securing a certain amount of 
happiness to himself, at some time, either near or remote — 
on earth, or after he has quitted earth ; the other no motive 
but that of saving a life which was dearer to him than his 
own ; in which case would our feeling of moral approbation 
more strongly arise ? Is it the more selfish of the two 
whom alone we should consider as the moral hero ? or 
rather, is it not only in thinking of him who forgot every 
thing but the call of friendship, and the disinterested 
feeling of duty which prompted him to obey the call, that 
we should feel any moral approbation whatever? It is 
precisely in proportion as selfish happiness is absent from 
the mind of the agent, or is supposed to be absent from it, 
in any sacrifice which is made for another, that the moral 
admiration arises ; and what, then, can we think of a theory 
of this very moral admiration, which asserts it to arise only 
when it does not arise, and not to arise only when it does 
arise ? We should not hesitate long in rejecting a theory 
of fluidity which should ascribe congelation to an increase 
of heat, and liquefaction to a diminution of it ; and as little 
ought we to hesitate in rejecting a theory of virtue that 
supposes the moral approbation which gives birth to our 



of paley's system. 



135 



very notion of virtue, to arise only when the immediate 
motive of the agent has been the view of his own happiness 
in this or any other world ; and to be precluded, therefore, 
by the very generosity of the agent, in every case in 
which he thought only of the happiness of others which 
he could increase, of the misery of others which he could 
relieve. 

That part of the system of Dr. Paley, then, which makes 
the sole motive to virtue the happiness of the agent himself, 
is false as a picture of the feelings of moral approbation 
and disapprobation for which it professes to account. The 
other part of his system of virtue, however, which resolves 
it into conformity to the will of God, as obeyed from 
this motive of personal gain, may merit a little fuller 
investigation. 



LECTURE VIII. 

EXAMINATION OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM CONCLUDED J EXAMINATION OP 
DR. SMITH'S SYSTEM. 

In the close of my last Lecture, after examining different 
modifications of the selfish system, I proceeded to consider 
one form of it, which has not usually been ranked with the 
others, but which is not less absolutely selfish; since it 
supposes the sole motive to virtue to be the view of our own 
personal advantage ; the only difference being, that instead 
of fixing its desires on the quantity of pleasure which can 
be enjoyed in this life, it extends them to the greater 
quantity of pleasure which may be enjoyed by us in the 
everlasting life that awaits us ; having still, however, no 
other motive than the desire of this personal enjoyment, and 
the corresponding fear of pain, in the actions which may 



136 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



seem, but only seem, to arise from a disinterested love of 
God, or a disinterested love of those whom God has com- 
mitted to our affection. 

The greater or less quantity of pleasure, however, which 
is coveted by us, either in intensity or duration, does not 
alter the nature of the principle which covets it ; if the 
perception of the means of gratifying our own individual 
appetite for enjoyment, whether the pleasure be great or 
slight, near or remote, brief or everlasting, be all which 
constitutes what is in that case strangely termed moral 
obligation : and the system of Paley, therefore, to which I 
particularly alluded, — a system which defines virtue to be 
" the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of 
God, for the sake of everlasting happiness," and which 
makes, not the love of God, nor the love of mankind, but 
this love of everlasting happiness, the motive and sole 
obligation to the good which otherwise we should have had 
as little moral desire of producing or promoting, as of 
producing an equal or greater amount of evil, must be 
allowed to be, in its very essence, as truly selfish, as if it 
had defined virtue to be the pursuit of mere wealth, or 
fame, or of the brief dignities, or still briefer pleasures of 
this mortal existence. 

" There is always understood to be a difference between 
an act of prudence and an act of duty. Thus, if I 
distrusted a man who owed me money, I should reckon it 
an act of prudence to get another bound with him : but I 
should hardly call it an act of duty. On the other hand, 
it would be thought a very unusual and loose kind of 
language to say, that, as I had made such a promise, it 
was prudent to perform it ; or that, as my friend, when 
he w^nt abroad, placed a box of jewels in my hands, it 
would be prudent in me to preserve it for him till he 
returned/' 1 

1 Paley's Moral Philosophy, book ii. chap. iii. 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



is: 



If the most prudent labourer after his own selfish interest, 
without the slightest regard for the happiness of others, 
unless as that happiness may be instrumental to his own, 
be constantly actuated by the same moral motive which 
influences the most generous lover of mankind, how strange 
an illusion is all moral sentiment, which views with such 
different feelings objects that are in every moral respect 
precisely the same. But it is in our emotions alone that 
our notions of morality have their rise : and how illusive, 
therefore, and radically false I should rather say, must be 
that system which is founded on the absolute similarity of 
feelings that are recognised by every bosom as absolutely 
dissimilar. 

Though I trust, then, it is sufficiently evident to you, 
from the results of the long discussion in which we have 
been engaged, that the moral obligation to virtue is not, as 
Paley says, the mere inducement of pleasure held out to us 
by power which we cannot disobey, without losing the 
pleasure, and encountering pain, but an inducement of a 
nobler kind, since pleasure, though it may lead us to be 
virtuous, may surely, as mere pleasure, if there be no 
essential distinction of it, as pure or impure, right or 
wrong, often lead us into what we are at present accus- 
tomed to denominate vice ; and though I shall therefore 
not repeat, in application to this enlarged selfishness, 
which extends its interested view through immortality, 
the objections previously urged against that more limited 
selfishness which looks only to the surface of the earth, 
and to the few years in which we are to be moving 
along it, it may be of importance to make a few remarks 
on that other part of the doctrine of this celebrated moralist, 
which makes conformity to the will of God the rule of 
virtue. 

That virtuous actions — those actions which excite in us 
the feeling of moral approval — are conformable to the will 
of God, there can be no reason to doubt ; since the very 



138 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



universality of this approval may be regarded as a sort of 
expression of the divine approbation. As little can we 
doubt that when the declared will of God is present to our 
mind, and we think of certain actions as commanded by 
him, of certain other actions as prohibited by him, and 
when, in designing or meditating any action, we feel that 
it is one of those which he has prohibited, there would arise 
in our mind an instant feeling of disapprobation, that is to 
say, of vice or demerit, in the performance of the prohibited 
action. But the question is not, whether it be virtue to 
conform our will to that of the Deity, when that will is 
revealed to us, or Nearly implied ; for of this there can be 
no doubt. It is, whether there be not in our nature a prin- 
ciple of moral approbation, from which our feelings of obliga- 
tion, virtue, merit, flow ; and which operates, not indepen- 
dently of the divine will indeed, for it was the divine will 
which implanted in us this very principle ; but without the 
necessary consideration, at the time, of the expression of 
the divine will, and consequently without any intentional 
conformity to it or disobedience, or which in our obedience 
itself, as often as we think of the divine will, is the very 
principle by which we feel the duty of such conformity. 
The mother, though she should, at the moment, forget 
altogether that there is a God in nature, would still turn 
with moral horror from the thought of murdering the little 
prattler who is sporting at her knee, and who is not more 
beautiful to her eye by external charms and graces, than 
beautiful to her heart by the thousand tendernesses which 
every day and almost every hour is developing ; while the 
child, who perhaps has scarcely heard that there is a God, 
or who at least is ignorant of any will of God, in conformity 
with which virtue consists, is still in his very ignorance 
developing those moral feelings which are supposed to be 
inconsistent with such ignorance, and would not have the 
same feeling of complacency in repaying the parental 
caresses with acts of intentional injury, as when he repays 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



139 



them with expressions of reciprocal love. Of all the 
mothers who, at this moment, on the earth, are exercised, 
and virtuously exercised, in maternal duties, around the 
cradles of their infants, there is perhaps not one who is 
thinking that God has commanded her to love her offspring, 
and to perform for them the many offices of love that are 
necessary for preserving the lives which are so^dear to her. 
The expression of the divine will, indeed, not merely gives 
us new and nobler duties to perform, it gives a new and 
nobler delight also to the very duties which our nature 
prompts ; but still there are duties which our nature 
prompts, and the violation of which is felt as moral wrong, 
even when God is known and worshipped only as a demon 
of power, still less benevolent than the very barbarians who 
howl around his altar in their savage sacrifice. 

But for the principle of moral approbation which the 
divine being has fixed in our nature, the expression of his 
will would itself have no moral power, whatever physical 
pain or pleasure it might hold out to our prudent choice. 
It may be asked, why should we obey the divine command, 
with as much reason as it may be asked, why should we 
love our parents or our country ? and our only answer to 
both questions, as far as morality can be said to be con- 
cerned, or any feeling different from that of a mere calcula- 
tion of physical loss or gain, is, that such is our nature ; 
that, in considering the command of God, our greatest 
of benefactors, or in considering the happiness of our 
parents, our country, mankind, which it is in our power to 
promote, we feel that to act in conformity with these, will 
be followed by our moral approbation ; as to act in opposi- 
tion to them will be followed by inevitable self-reproach. 
There is a principle of moral discrimination already existing 
in us, that, even when we conform our conduct to the 
divine will, is the very principle by which we have felt the 
duty of this delightful conformity ; and if there be no such 
principle in our nature, by which we discover the duty of 



HO 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



the conformity, it is surely very evident that there can be 
no such duty to be felt, any more than there can be colour 
to the blind, or melody to the deaf. 

God may be loved by us, or feared by us. He may be 
loved by us as the source of all our blessings, conferred or 
promised. He may be feared by us as a being who has the 
power of inflicting on us eternal anguish. In one of these 
views, we may, when we obey him, act from gratitude ; in 
the other, from a sense of the evils which we have to dread 
in offending him. But if it be a duty of gratitude to obey 
God, we must previously have been capable of knowing 
that gratitude is a virtue, as much as we must have been 
capable of knowing the power of God, before we could have 
known to fear his awful dominion. We consider the Deity 
as possessing the highest moral perfection : but in that 
theological view of morality which acknowledges no mode 
of estimating excellence beyond that divine command itself, 
whatever it might have been, these words are absolutely 
meaningless ; since if, instead of what we now term virtue, 
he had commanded only what we now term vice, his com- 
mand must still have been equally holy. If, indeed, the 
system of Paley, and of other theological moralists, were 
just, what excellence beyond the excellence of mere power, 
could we discover in that divine being whom we adore as 
the supreme goodness, still more than we fear him as the 
omnipotent ? God has, indeed, commanded certain actions, 
and it is our virtue to conform our actions to his will ; but 
if the virtue depend exclusively on obedience to the com- 
mand, and if there be no peculiar moral excellence in the 
actions commanded, he must have been equally adorable, 
though nature had exhibited only appearances of unceasing 
malevolence in its author ; and every command which he 
had delivered to his creatures had been only to add new 
voluntary miseries to the physical miseries which already 
surrounded them. In the system of Hobbes, which con- 
siders law itself, as constituent of moral right, a tyrant, if 



OF THE SELFISH SYSTEM. 



141 



his power of enacting law be sufficiently established, is not 
to be distinguished, in his very tyranny, from the generous 
sovereign of the free ; because the measure of right is to be 
found in his will alone. In the system of Paley, in like 
manner, if virtue be conformity to the will of God, what- 
ever that will may be, and there be no moral measure of 
the excellence of that will itself, God and the most malig- 
nant demon have no moral difference to our heart, but as 
the one and not the other is the irresistible sovereign of the 
universe. 

The will of God, then, though it is unquestionably the 
source of virtue, in the most important sense — as it was his 
will that formed all the principles of our constitution, of 
which the principle of moral approbation is one — is not the 
source of virtue in the sense in which that phrase is under- 
stood by some theological writers, as limited to the mere 
declaration of his will, sanctioned by punishment and re- 
ward. There is an earlier law of God, which he has written 
in our hearts ; and the desire of our mere personal happi- 
ness or misery, in this or in another world, is truly an object 
of our approbation, not the source of it ; since the love of 
mere selfish enjoyment is at least as powerfully the motive 
to vice, in some cases, as it is in other cases the motive to 
virtue. We do not merely submit to the will of God as 
we submit to any power which it is impossible for us to 
resist. We feel that it would be not imprudence only, but 
guilt, to wish to disobey it. We seek, in the constitution 
of our nature, the reason which leads us to approve morally 
of the duty of this conformity of our will to his beneficent 
and supreme will ; and we find, in one of the essential 
principles of our nature, the moral reason which we seek. 

After this examination of the various systems, which 
may be considered as more or less directly opposed to the 
belief of that principle of moral feeling — the original sus- 
ceptibility of moral emotion on the contemplation of certain 
actions — for which I have contended, there is still one 



142 



of smith's system. 



system which deserves to be considered by us, in relation 
to this belief, not as being subversive of morality, in any 
one of its essential distinctions, but as appearing to fix 
morality on a basis that is not sufficiently firm ; with the 
discovery of the instability of which, therefore, the virtues 
that are represented as supported on it, might be considered 
as themselves unstable : as the statue, though it be the 
image of a god, or the column, though it be a part of a 
sacred temple, may fall, not because it is not sufficiently cohe- 
sive and firm in itself, but because it is too massy for the 
feeble pedestal on which it has been placed. 

The system to which I allude is that which is delivered 
by Dr. Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, — a work 
unquestionably of the first rank in a science which I can- 
not but regard, as to man, the most interesting of sciences. 
Profound in thought, it exhibits, even when it is most pro- 
found, an example of the graces with which a sage imagi- 
nation knows how to adorn the simple and majestic form of 
science, that is severe and cold only to those who are them- 
selves cold and severe, as in those very graces it exhibits, 
in like manner, an example of the reciprocal embel- 
lishment which imagination receives from the sober 
dignity of truth. In its minor details and illustrations, 
indeed, it may be considered as presenting a model of phi- 
losophic beauty, of which all must acknowledge the power, 
who are not disqualified by their very nature for the ad- 
miration and enjoyment of intellectual excellence ; so dull 
of understanding as to shrink with a painful consciousness 
of incapacity at the very appearance of refined analysis, or 
so dull and cold of heart, as to feel no charm in the delight- 
ful varieties of an eloquence that, in the illustration and 
embellishment of the noblest truths, seems itself to live and 
harmonize with those noble sentiments which it adorns. 

It is chiefly in its minor analyses, however, that I con- 
ceive the excellence of this admirable work to consist. Its 
leading doctrine I am far from admitting. Indeed, it seems 



of smith's system. 



143 



to me as manifestly false, as the greater number of its 
secondary and minute delineations appear to me faithful to 
the fine lights, and faint and flying shades, of that moral 
nature which they represent. 

According to Dr. Smith, we do not immediately approve 
of certain actions, or disapprove of certain other actions, 
when we have become acquainted with the intention of the 
agent, and the consequences, beneficial or injurious, of what 
he has done. All these we might know thoroughly, with- 
out a feeling of the slightest approbation or disapprobation. 
It is necessary, before any moral sentiment arise, that the 
mind should go through another process, that by which we 
seem for the time to enter into the feelings of the agent, 
and of those to whom his action has relation in its conse- 
quences, or intended consequences, beneficial or injurious. 
If, by a process of this kind, on considering all the circum- 
stances in which the agent was placed, we feel a complete 
sympathy with the passions or calmer emotions that 
actuated him, and with the gratitude of him who was the 
object of the action, we approve of the action itself as right, 
and feel the merit of the agent ; our sense of the propriety 
of the action depending on our sympathy with the agent, 
our sense of the merit of the agent on our sympathy with 
the object of the action. If our sympathies be of an 
opposite kind, we disapprove of the action itself as impro- 
per, that is to say, unsuitable to the circumstances, and 
ascribe not merit but demerit to the agent. In sympathiz- 
ing with the gratitude of others, we should have regarded 
the agent as worthy of reward ; in sympathizing with 
the resentment of others, we regard him as worthy of 
punishment. 

Such is the supposed process in estimating the actions of 
others. When we regard our own conduct we in some 
measure reverse this process ; or rather, by a process still 
more refined, we imagine others sympathizing with us, and 
sympathize with their sympathy. We consider how our 



144 



of smith's system. 



conduct would appear to an impartial spectator. We 
approve of it, if it be that of which we feel that he would 
approve ; we disapprove of it, if it be that which we feel 
by the experience of our own former emotions, when we 
have ourselves, in similar circumstances, estimated the 
actions of others, would excite his disapprobation. "We 
are able to form a judgment as to our own conduct, 
therefore, because we have previously judged of the moral 
conduct of others, that is to say, have previously sym- 
pathized with the feelings of others ; and but for the 
presence, or supposed presence, of some impartial spectator, 
as a mirror to represent to us ourselves, we should as 
little have known the beauty or deformity of our own 
moral character, as we should have known the beauty or 
ugliness of our external features without some mirror to re- 
flect them to our eye. 

In this brief outline of Dr. Smith's system, I have of 
course confined myself to the leading doctrine, of which his 
theory is the development. If this doctrine of the necessary 
antecedence of sympathy to our moral approbation or dis- 
approbation be just, the system may be admitted, even 
though many of his minor illustrations should appear to be 
false. If this primary doctrine be not just, the system, 
however ingenious and just in its explanation of many 
phenomena of the mind, must fail as a theory of our moral 
sentiments. 

To derive our moral sentiments, which are as universal 
as the actions of mankind that come under our review, 
from the occasional sympathies, that warm or sadden us 
with joys and griefs and resentments which are not our 
own, seems to me, I confess, very nearly the same sort of 
error as it would be to derive the waters of an ever-flowing 
stream from the sunshine or shade that may occasionally 
gleam over it. That we have a principle of social feeling, 
which, in its rapid participation of the vivid emotions of 
others, seems to identify us in many cases with the happy 



of smith's system. 



145 



or the sorrowful, the grateful or the indignant, it is impos- 
sible to deny. But this sympathy, quick as it truly is to 
arise, in cases in which the primary feelings are yivid and 
strongly marked, is not a perpetual accompaniment of every 
action of every one around us. There must be some vivid- 
ness of feeling in others, or the display of vividness of feel- 
ing, or at least such a situation as usually excites vivid 
feeling, of some sort, in those who are placed in it, to call 
the sympathy itself into action. In the number of petty 
affairs which are hourly before our eyes, what sympathy is 
felt either with those who are actively or those who are 
passively concerned, when the agent himself performs his 
little offices with emotions as slight as those which the 
objects of his actions reciprocally feel? Yet, in these 
cases, we are as capable of judging, and approve or dis- 
approve, not with the same liveliness of emotion indeed, but 
with as accurate estimation of merit or demerit, as when 
we consider the most heroic sacrifices which the virtuous 
can make, or the most atrocious crimes of which the sordid 
and the cruel can be guilty. It is not the absolute vivid- 
ness of our emotion, however, but its mere correspondence 
in degree with the emotion of others, which affects our 
estimates of the propriety of their actions ; and it must be 
remembered, that it is not any greater or less vividness of 
our sympathetic feeling, but the accuracy of our estimation 
of merit and demerit, whether great or slight, by the sym- 
pathetic feelings supposed, which is the only point in ques- 
tion. There is no theory of our moral distinctions, which 
supposes that we are to approve equally of all actions that 
are right, and to disapprove equally of all actions which 
are wrong; but it is essential to one theory — that theory 
which we are considering — that there should be no feeling 
of right or wrong, merit or demerit, and consequently no 
moral estimation whatever, where there is no previous 
sympathy in that particular case. The humblest action, 
therefore, which we denominate right, must have awakened 

H 



146 



of smith's system. 



our sympathy as much as those glorious actions which we 
are never weary of extolling, in the very commendation of 
which we think not of the individual only with thankful- 
ness, but with a sort of proud delight of ourselves, of our 
country, of the common nature of man, as ennobled by the 
virtue, that, instead of receiving dignity from the homage 
of our praises, confers dignity on the very gratitude and 
reverence which offer them. If we were to think only 
those actions right in which our sympathy is excited, the 
class of indifferent actions would comprehend the whole 
life, or nearly the whole life, of almost all the multitude of 
those around us, and indeed of almost all mankind. A 
few great virtues and great iniquities would still remain in 
our system of practical ethics, to be applauded or censured ; 
but the morality of the common transactions of life, which, 
though less important in each particular case, is, upon the 
whole, more important from its extensive diffusion, would 
disappear altogether as morality, as that which it is right 
to observe, and wrong to omit, and though it might still be 
counted useful, would admit of no higher denomination of 
praise. The supposed necessary universality then, in our 
moral sentiments, of that which, however frequent, is surely 
far from universal, would of itself seem to me a sufficient 
objection to the theory of Dr. Smith. 

Even if the sympathy for which he contends were as 
universal as it is absolutely necessary for the truth of his 
theory that it should be, it must still be admitted that our 
sympathy is, in degree at least, one of the most irregular 
and seemingly capricious of principles in the constitution 
of the mind ; and on this very account, therefore, not very 
likely to be the commensurable test or standard of feelings 
so regular, upon the whole, as our general estimates of right 
and wrong. But though it would be very easy to show the 
force of this objection, I hasten from it, and from all objec- 
tions of this kind, to that which seems to me to be the 
essential error of the system. 



of smith's system. 



147 



This essential error, the greatest of all possible systematic 
errors, is no less than the assumption, in every case, of those 
very moral feelings which are supposed to flow from 
sympathy, the assumption of them as necessarily existing 
before that very sympathy in which they are said to 
originate. 

Let us allow, then, every thing which we can suppose it 
possible for the author of the theory to have claimed ; let 
us admit that the sympathy of which he speaks, instead of 
being limited to a few cases of vivid feeling, is as universal 
as he contends ; that it is as little variable in kind, or in 
degree, as our notions of right and wrong ; and, in short, 
that it is in perfect accordance with our moral sentiments ; 
even though, with all these admissions, we were to admit 
also the very process which Dr. Smith supposes to take 
place exactly in the manner which he supposes, it would 
be very evident, that still, after so many important con- 
cessions, the moral sentiments could not be regarded as 
having their source in the sympathy, but as preceding it ; 
or, if no moral sentiments of any kind preceded it, the 
sympathy itself could not afford them more than a mirror, 
which reflects to us, from the opposite landscape, the sunny 
hill, the rock, and the trees, gleaming through the spray 
of the waterfall, could of itself, without any external light, 
produce all that beautiful variety of colours, with which it 
delights our vision, as if it were the very scene on which 
we have loved to gaze. 

Let us consider, then, with a little nicer analysis, 
the process of which Dr. Smith speaks, admitting the 
sympathy for which he contends, and admitting it in the 
fullest extent which can be conceived necessary to his 
theory. 

In this theory, as you have seen, he has separated our 
feeling of the propriety or impropriety of the action from 
our feeling of the merit or demerit of the agent, ascribing 
the one to our sympathy with the emotions of the agent in 



148 



of smith's system. 



the circumstances in which he was placed, the other to our 
sympathy with the gratitude or resentment of those who 
have been affected by the action. I have already endea- 
voured to show you, that we have only one feeling of 
appro vablen ess, arising on the contemplation of an action, 
which, as variously referred to the agent or to the action 
considered abstractly, is at once the felt propriety of the 
action and the felt merit of the agent. Indeed, it seems to 
me as absurd to suppose that we can conceive an action to 
be wrong, in the moral sense of that word, without any 
notion of the demerit of the voluntary agent, or conceive 
the demerit of the voluntary agent, without any notion of 
the impropriety of his action, as it would be to suppose 
that we can imagine a circle without a centre, or a centre 
without a circle. But let us adopt, without objection, the 
supposed analysis which Dr. Smith has made of our moral 
sentiments, and admit that, in the constitution of these, 
there are two distinct feelings that give occasion to corre- 
sponding moral notions of propriety and merit, which one 
of these feelings alone could not have produced ; in 
short, let us admit, that we might have conceived an 
action to be morally wrong, without any demerit on 
the part of the agent, or have conceived the greatest 
demerit on his part, without any moral impropriety in his 
action. 

The first supposed sympathy which we have to con- 
sider, is that which is said to give occasion to our moral 
estimates of actions as proper or improper, without 
regard to the merit or demerit of the agent, that are felt by 
us only through the medium of another sympathy. 

This notion of moral propriety or impropriety, we are 
told, could not have been produced in us by the most atten- 
tive consideration of the action, and of all its circumstances ; 
another process must intervene. We feel the propriety of 
the action, only because we sympathize with the agent. We 
make his circumstances our own, and our passion being in 



of smith's system. 



149 



unison with his, we regard it as suitable to the circum- 
stances, and therefore as morally proper. 

If we have, indeed, previous notions of moral right and 
wrong, or some other source in which they may be found, 
this belief of the propriety of certain feelings that accord 
with ours, might be sufficiently intelligible ; but the most 
complete sympathy of feelings, the most exact accordancy, 
is not sufficient to constitute or give' rise to the moral senti- 
ments of which we are treating ; when there is nothing 
more than a sympathy of feelings, without that previous 
moral sentiment, which, in Dr. Smith's system, we must 
always tacitly presuppose. In the very striking emotions 
of taste, for example, we may feel, on the perusal of the 
same poem, the performance of the same musical air, the 
sight of the same picture, or statue, a rapture or disgust, 
accordant with the rapture or disgust expressed by another 
reader, or listener, or spectator ; a sympathy far more com- 
plete than takes place in our consideration of the circum- 
stances in which he may have had to regulate his conduct 
in any of the common affairs of life ; in which our secondary 
emotion, if it be at all excited, is excited but faintly. If 
mere accordance of emotion, then, imply the feeling of 
moral excellence of any sort, we should certainly feel a 
moral regard for all whose taste coincides with ours; yet, 
however gratifying the sympathy in such a case may be, 
we do not feel, in consequence of this sympathy, anv 
morality in the taste that is most exactly accordant with 
our own. There is an agreement of emotions, a sort of 
physical suitableness that is felt by us of the emotions, as 
effects to the works of art as causes, but nothing more ; 
and if we had not a principle of moral approbation, by 
which, independently of sympathy, and previously to it, we 
regard actions as right, the most exact sympathy of passions 
would, in like manner, have been a proof to us of an agree- 
ment of feelings, but of nothing more. It proves to us 
more, because the emotions, which we compare with our 



L50 



of smith's system. 



own. are recognised by us as moral feelings, independently 
of the mere agreement. "We do not merely share the senti- 
ments of the agent, but we share his moral sentiments, the 
recognition of which, as moral sentiments, has preceded our 
very sympathy. 

Why is it that we regard emotions which do not har- 
monize with our own. not merely as unlike to ours, which 
is one view of them, but as morally improper, which is a 
very different view of them \ It mus: surely be. because 
we regard our own emotions which differ from them as 
morally proper ; and, if we regard our own emotions as 
proper, before we can judge the emotions which do not 
harmonize with them to be improper on that account, what 
influence can the supposed sympathy and comparison have 
had. in ^ivine birth to that moral sentiment which pre- 
ceded the comparison ? They show us only feelings that 
differ from ours, and that are improper because ours are 
proper. The sympathy, therefore, on which the feeling of 
propriety is said to depend, assumes the previous belief of 
that very propriety ; or, if there be no previous belief of 
the moral suitableness of our own emotions, there can be 
no reason, from the mere dissonance of other emotions with 
ours, to regard these dissonant emotions as morally unsuit- 
able to the circumstances in which they have arisen. We 
ma y, perhaps, conceive them to be physically unsuitable, in 
the same manner as we regard the taste as erroneous, which 
approves of poetry as sublime that to us appears bombastic 
or mean ; but we can as little feel any moral regard in the 
one case as in the other, unless we have previously distin- 
guished the one set of emotions as moral emotions, the 
other set as emotions of taste. 

With respect to the former of the two sympathies, then, 
which Dr. Smith regards as essential to our moral senti- 
ments, the sympathy from which he supposes us to derive 
our notions of actions, as right or wrong, proper or im- 
proper. — that is to say, as morally suitable or unsuit- 



of smith's system. 



151 



able to the circumstances in which the action takes place, 
we have seen that it assumes, as independent of the sym- 
pathy, the very feelings to which the sympathy is said to 
give rise. 

Let us next consider the latter of the two sympathies, to 
which we are said to owe our notion of merit or demerit in 
the agent, as distinct from the propriety or impropriety of 
his action. 

These sentiments of merit or demerit arise, we are told, 
not from any direct consideration of the agent and of the 
circumstances of his action, but from our sympathy with 
the gratitude or resentment of those who have derived 
benefit or injury, or at least whom he is supposed to have 
wished to derive benefit or injury, from that good or evil 
which he purposed. If, on considering the circumstances 
of the case, we feel that our emotions of this sort would, in 
a similar situation, harmonize with theirs, we regard 
the agent in the same light in which they regard him, 
as worthy of reward in the one case, or of punishment 
in the other, that is to say, as having moral merit or 
demerit. 

If our sense of merit were confined to cases in which the 
action had a direct relation to others, with whose gratitude 
we might be supposed to sympathize, this theory of merit 
would at least be more distinctly conceivable. But what 
are we to think of cases in which the action begins and 
terminates, without a thought of the happiness of others, in 
the amelioration of the individual himself; of sacrifices 
resolutely but silently made to the mere sense of duty ; the 
voluntary relinquishment of luxurious indulgences ; the 
struggle, and at last the victory over appetites and passions 
that are felt to be inconsistent with the sanctity of virtue ; 
and over habits, still more difficult to be subdued than the 
very appetites or passions which may have given them 
their power ? In such cases, our sense of the merit of the 
victor in this noble strife, when we do not think of the 



152 



of smith's system. 



gratitude of a single individual, because there is, in truth, 
no gratitude of which to think, is, notwithstanding, as 
vivid as if we had around us whole families and tribes of 
the grateful to excite our sympathy, and to continue to 
harmonize with it. The world, indeed, the great commu- 
nity of individuals, it may be said, is truly benefited by 
every increase of virtue in any one of the individuals who 
compose it ; and it may be possible, in this way, to invent 
some species of gratitude of the whole multitude of man- 
kind, that may "be supposed to awake our sympathy, and 
thus to make us feel a merit even in such cases, which 
otherwise we should not have felt. But, though it may be 
possible for us, with due care and effort of thought, to in- 
vent this abstract or remote gratitude with which ours may 
be supposed to harmonize, can it be imagined by any one 
but the most obstinate defender of a system, that this 
strange sympathy, of which no one perhaps has been con- 
scious in any case, truly and constantly takes place when- 
ever we thus approve? that we do not feel any merit 
whatever in the voluntary privations which virtue makes, 
till we have previously excited ourselves to admire them, 
by reflecting on a grateful world ? Such a reflex thankful- 
ness, if it occur at all, does not occur to one of many 
thousands, who require, for their instant perception of the 
merit, only the knowledge of the sacrifices of present enjoy- 
ment which have been made, and of the pure motives which 
led to the sacrifices. It is not only the Hercules who freed 
the world from robbers aud monsters that we admire : we 
admire, at least as much, in the beautiful ancient allegory, 
the same moral hero when he resisted the charms and the 
solicitations of Pleasure herself. The choice of Hercules, 
indeed, is fabulous. But the choice which he is fabled 
to have made, has been the choice of the virtuous of every 
age ; and, in every age, the sacrifices internally and 
silently made to duty and conscience, have been ranked in 
merit with the sacrifices which had for their direct object 



of smith's system. 



153 



the happiness of others, and for their immediate reward the 
gratitude of the happy. Why is it that we look with so 
much honour on the martyr in those early ages of persecu- 
tion, which, collecting around the victim every instrument 
of torture, required of him only a few grains of incense to 
be thrown before a statue, more noble, indeed, than the 
imperial murderer whom it represented, but still only a 
statue, the effigy of a being of human form, who, under the 
purple which clothed him, with the diadem and the sceptre 
and the altar, far from being a god, was himself one of the 
lowest of the things which God had made ! When placed 
thus between idolatry and every form of bodily anguish, 
with life and guilt before him, and death and innocence, 
the hero of a pure faith looked fearlessly on the cross or on 
the stake, and calmly and without wrath on the statue 
which he refused to worship, and on all the ready ministers 
of cruelty, that were rejoicing in the new work which they 
had to perform, and the new amusement which they were 
to give to the impatient crowd, — do we feel that there was 
no merit in the magnanimity, because we cannot readily 
discover some gratitude which we may participate ? or, if 
we do feel any merit, is it only on account of some grati- 
tude which we have at last succeeded in discovering? We 
do not think of any thankfulness of man. We think only 
of God and virtue, and of the heroic sufferer, to whom God 
and virtue were all, and the suffering of such a moment 
nothing. 

That our feeling of merit, then, is not a reflected grati- 
tude, but arises from the direct contemplation of the meri- 
torious action, might, if any proof were necessary, appear 
sufficiently evident from the equal readiness of this feeling 
to arise in cases in which it would be difficult to discover 
any gratitude with which we can be supposed to sympa- 
thize, and in which the individual himself, and the circum- 
stances of his action, are all that is before us. But though 
this, and every other objection to Dr. Smith's theory of our 

H 2 



154 



OF SMITH S SYSTEM. 



feeling of merit, were to be abandoned, there would still 
remain the great objection, that the sympathy which he 
supposes in this case, as in that formerly examined by us, 
proceeds on the existence of that very moral sentiment 
which it is stated by him to produce. 

We discover the merit of the agent in any case, it is 
said, by that sympathetic tendency of our nature, in conse- 
quence of which, on considering any particular action, we 
place ourselves in the situation of those who are benefited 
by the action, when, if we feel an emotion of gratitude like 
theirs, we of course consider the agent himself as meritori- 
ous, worthy of the reward of which they consider him to be 
worthy ; and, in like manner, on considering any action of 
injustice or malevolence, we feel the demerit of the agent 
by sympathizing with the resentment of those whom the 
action has injured. 

Such is the process asserted. But what is it that is truly 
supposed in this process, as distinguishing the sympathetic 
and secondary feelings, from the primary feelings of those 
who were directly concerned ? 

TTe place ourselves in the situation of others, or, rather, 
without willing it, or knowing the change till it is produced, 
we feel ourselves, by some sudden illusion, as if placed in 
their situation. In this imaginary sameness of circum- 
stances we have feelings similar to theirs. They view their 
beuefactor as worthy of reward. TTe, therefore, consider- 
ing for the moment the benefit as if conferred on us, regard 
him likewise as worthy of reward : or if they consider him 
worthy of punishment, we too consider him worthy of 
punishment. Their gratitude or resentment is founded on 
real benefit received, or real injury. Our gratitude or 
resentment is founded on the illusive momentary belief of 
benefit or injury. But this difference of reality and illu- 
sion in the circumstances which give occasion to them, is 
the only difference of the feelings; unless, indeed, that as 
the illusion cannot be of very long continuance, and is, 



of smith's system. 



155 



probably, even while it lasts, less powerful than the reality, 
our sympathetic feelings, however similar in kind, may be 
supposed to be weaker in degree. 

The effect of the sympathy, then, being only to transfuse 
into our breasts the gratitude or resentment of those who 
have been immediately benefited or injured by any generous 
or malevolent action, if the original gratitude imply belief 
of merit in the object of the gratitude, and the original 
resentment imply belief of demerit in its object, we may, 
by our sympathy with these direct original feelings, be im- 
pressed with similar belief of merit or demerit. But, in 
this case, it is equally evident that if our reflex gratitude 
and resentment involve notions of merit and demerit, the 
original gratitude and resentment which we feel by reflec- 
tion must in like manner have involved them ; and must 
even have involved them with more vivid feeling, since the 
difference of vividness was the chief or only circumstance 
of difference in the direct and the sympathetic emotions. 
The sympathy, then, to which we are supposed to owe our 
moral sentiments of merit and demerit, presupposes those 
very sentiments ; since the feelings which arise in us by 
sympathy, only from the illusion by which we place our- 
selves in the situation of others, must, in those who were 
truly in that very situation, have arisen directly with at 
least equal power. It is some previous gratitude with 
which we sympathize; it is some previous resentment with 
which we sympathize ; and merit is said to be only that 
worthiness of reward which the gratitude itself implies, and 
demerit that worthiness of punishment which is implied in 
the primary resentment. If the feeling of gratitude im- 
plied no notion of any relation of worthiness, which our 
benefactor s generosity bears to the reward which we wish 
that we were capable of bestowing on him, and our resent- 
ment, in like manner, implied no notion of a similar rela- 
tion of the injustice or cruelty of him who has injured us, 
to that punishment of his offence which we wish and 



156 



of smith's system. 



anticipate, we might then, indeed, be obliged to seek some 
other source of these felt relations. But if the actual 
gratitude or resentment of those who have profited or 
suffered imply no feelings of merit or demerit, we may be 
certain, at least, that in whatever source we are to strive 
to discover these feelings, it is not in the mere reflection 
of a fainter gratitude or resentment that we can hope to 
find them. 

After admitting to Dr. Smith, then, every thing which 
he could be supposed to claim, or even to wish to claim, 
with respect to the universality, the steadiness, and the 
vividness of our sympathetic feelings, we have seen, that 
in both the sympathies which he supposes to take place, 
that from which we are said to derive our moral sentiments 
of the propriety or impropriety of actions, and that from 
which wo are said, in like manner, to derive our moral 
sentiments of merit or demerit in the agent, the process to 
which he ascribes the origin of these moral sentiments can- 
not even be understood without the belief of their previous 
existence. The feelings with which we sympathize are 
themselves moral feelings or sentiments ; or, if they are not 
moral feelings, the reflection of them from a thousand breasts 
cannot alter their nature. 



LECTURE IX. 

EXAMINATION OF DR. SMITH'S SYSTEM CONCLUDED ; RECAPITULATION 
OP THE DOCTRINES OF MORAL APPROBATION. 

My last Lecture was chiefly employed in considering a 
theory of our moral sentiments which has been stated and 
defended with great eloquence by one of the profoundest 
philosophers whom our country and our science can boast ; 



of smith's system. 



157 



a theory which founds our moral sentiments, not on the 
direct contemplation of the actions which we term virtuous, 
but on a sympathy which it is impossible for us not to 
feel, with the emotions of the agent in the circumstances in 
which he has been placed, and with the emotions also of 
those to whom his actions haye been productive of benefit 
or injury; our direct sympathy with the agent giving rise 
to our notion of the propriety of his action, our indirect 
sympathy with those whom his actions have benefited or 
injured giving rise to our notions of merit or demerit in the 
agent himself. Both these supposed sympathies I examined 
with a more minute review than that to which they have 
usually been submitted ; and in both cases we found, that 
even though many other strong objections to which the 
theory is liable were abandoned, and though the process 
for which the theorist contends were allowed to take place 
to the fullest extent to which he contends for it, his system 
would still be liable to the insuperable objection, that the 
moral sentiments which he ascribes to our secondary feel- 
ings of mere sympathy, are assumed as previously existing 
in those original emotions with which the secondary feel- 
ings are said to be in unison. If those to whom an action 
has directly related are incapable of discovering, by the 
longest and minutest examination of it, however much they 
may have been benefited by it or injured, and intentionally 
benefited or injured, any traces of right or wrong, merit or 
demerit, in the performer of the action, those whose sym- 
pathy consists merely in an illusory participation of the 
same interest, cannot surely derive, from the fainter reflex 
feelings, that moral knowledge which even the more vivid 
primary emotions were incapable of affording, any more 
than we can be supposed to acquire, from the most faithful 
echo, important truths that were never uttered by the 
voices which it reflects. *Fhe utmost influence of the live- 
liest sympathy can be only to render the momentary feelings 
the same, as if the identity of situation with the object of 



158 



of smith's system. 



the sympathy were not illusive, but real; and what it 
would be impossible for the mind to feel, if really existing 
in the circumstances supposed, it must be impossible for it 
also to feel, when it believes itself to exist in them, and is 
affected in the same manner, as if truly that very mind 
with whose emotions it sympathizes. 

If, indeed, we had previously any moral notions of 
actions as right or wrong, we might very easily judge of 
the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of others, 
according as our own do or do not sympathize with them ; 
and it is this ^previous feeling of propriety or impropriety 
which Dr. Smith tacitly assumes, even in contending for 
the exclusive influence of the sympathy, as itself the 
original source of every moral sentiment. The sentiments 
of others could not fail, indeed, in that case, to appear to 
lis proper, if they coincided with sentiments which we had 
before, in our own mind, recognised as proper, or morally 
suitable to the circumstances ; improper if they differed 
from these. But if we have no previous moral notions 
whatever, the most exact sympathy of feelings can tell us 
only that our feelings are similar to the feelings of some 
other person, which they may be as much when they are 
vicious as when they are virtuous, or when they are neither 
virtuous nor vicious ; the most complete dissonance, in like 
manner, can tell us only that our feelings are not similar 
to those of some other person. When another calls scarlet 
or green what we have previously felt to be scarlet or green, 
we think that his vision and ours agree ; but we presuppose, 
in him as in ourselves, that visual sensibility which distin- 
guished the colours, and we do not consider him an object 
of moral regard, because his vision coincides with ours. 
When he is affected with a delightful emotion similar to 
ours, on the contemplation of a work of art, we acknowledge 
mentally, and are pleased perhaps with this coincidence of 
taste. But the coincidence does not seem to us to be that 
which constitutes the emotion of taste. On the contrary, 



of smith's system. 



159 



it presupposes in both an independent susceptibility of these 
emotions, by which we should, individually, have admired 
what is beautiful, and distinguished from it what is ugly, 
though no one had been present with us to participate our 
sentiments. When, in like manner, we admire, with vivid 
approbation, some generous action, — that is to say, accord- 
ing to Dr. Smith's language, when we sympathize with the 
feelings of any one in the circumstances in which he has 
been placed, we have a coincidence of feelings, indeed, as 
exact, though probably not more exact, than in a case of 
simple vision or admiration of some work of art, in which 
no moral sentiment was felt ; and this very coincidence, in 
like manner, presupposes a capacity of distinguishing and 
admiring what is right, without which there would have 
been a similarity of feelings and nothing more, precisely as 
in the other cases. It is not a mere coincidence of feeling 
however, which we recognise in our moral sentiments, like 
that which we recognise in the most exact coincidence of 
taste. We feel not merely that another has acted as we 
should have done, and that his motives, in similar circum- 
stances, have been similar to ours. We feel that, in acting 
as he has done, he has acted properly ; because, indepen- 
dently of the sympathy which merely gives us feelings to 
measure with our own, as we might measure with our own 
any other species of feelings, we are impressed with the 
propriety of the sentiments, according to which we trust 
that we should ourselves have acted ; so thoroughly 
impressed with these previous distinctions of right and 
wrong, that, in the opposite case of some act of atrocious 
delinquency, no sympathy in vice of one villain with 
another can make the common crime seem a virtue in the 
eyes of his accomplice, who is actuated by similar motives, 
and, therefore, by similar feelings, in a sympathy of the 
finest unison, when he adds his arm to the rapine and after- 
wards to the murder which is to conceal and to consummate 
the guilt. 



160 



of smith's system. 



The moral sentiments which we have as yet considered, 
are those which relate to the conduct and feelings of others. 
The same inconsistency which we found in the theory of 
these, is to be found, as might be supposed, in the appli- 
cation of the principle to the other species of supposed 
sympathy which we have still to consider, in the sentiments 
which we form of our own moral conduct. That we should 
be capable, indeed, of forming a moral estimate of our own 
actions, from the direct contemplation of the circumstances 
in which we may have been placed, and of the good or evil 
which we may have intentionally produced, would evidently 
be subversive of the whole theory of sympathy; since, with 
the same knowledge of circumstances and of intention, if 
we could form any moral judgment of our own actions, w T e 
might be equally capable of forming some moral judgment 
of the actions of others. It was absolutely necessary, 
therefore, for Dr. Smith to maintain, that we have no 
power of judging of our own actions directly, — that, know- 
ing the choice which we have made, and all the circum- 
stances which led to our choice, and all the consequences 
of benefit or injury to individuals and to the world, which 
our choice may have produced, it is yet absolutely impossible 
for us to distinguish, without the aid of the real or supposed 
sentiments of others, any difference of propriety or impro- 
priety, right or wrong, merit or demerit, or whatever other 
names we may use to express the differences of vice and 
virtue ; though our vice had been the atrocious fury of 
plunging a dagger in the heart of her who had been our 
happiness in many connubial years, and who was slumbering 
beside us on the same pillow, in the calmness of unsuspecting 
love ; or our virtue the clemency of drawing back from the 
bosom of the assassin whom we had laid at our feet, the 
dagger which we had wrenched from his murderous hand. 
Even of actions so different as these, it would be absolutely 
impossible for us, we are told, to form any moral distinc- 
tion, if we were to look on them only with our own eyes, 



of smith's system. 



161 



and measure them by the feelings of our own heart. Before 
the one can appear to us less virtuous than the other, we 
must imagine some witnesses or hearers of what has been 
done, and sympathize with their sympathy. Such is the 
process which Dr. Smith believes to take place. But 
surely, if our original feelings, on the consideration of all 
the circumstances of an action, involve no notion of right 
or wrong, the sympathy with our feelings, or our sympathy 
with that sympathy, or even an infinite series of reciprocal 
sympathies, if these should be thought necessary, cannot 
afford the moral notions of which the original feelings, 
themselves more vivid, afforded no elements. If the 
impartial spectator be able to discover merit or demerit, by 
making our case his own, and becoming conscious as it were 
of our feelings ; our feelings, which he thus makes his own, 
must speak to us with the same voice of moral instruction 
with which, during his temporary illusion, they speak to 
him. If, considering our action and all its consequences, 
we cannot discover any merit or demerit, they, considering 
our action in all its circumstances as theirs, must be alike 
insensible of any merit or demerit : or, if they have feelings 
essentially different from ours, they have not made our 
case their own, and what is misnamed sympathy has not 
been sympathy. Unless we presuppose, as I before said, 
on their part some moral notions of what is right or wrong, 
meritorious or worthy of punishment, by which they may 
measure our conduct and feelings, all the knowledge which 
the most complete sympathy can afford, is merely that they 
have certain feelings, that we have had certain feelings, 
and that these feelings are similar to each other, as our 
feelings have coincided before in various other emotions, 
perceptions, judgments that involved or suggested no moral 
notion whatever. 

We have now then considered, both in its relation to 
our sentiments of our own moral conduct, and in its relation 
to our sentiments of the conduct of others, the very cele- 



162 



RECAPITULATION OF THE DOCTRINES 



brated theory of Dr. Smith ; a theory which I cannot but 
regard as involving in morals the same error that would 
be involved in a theory of the source of light, if an optician, 
after showing us many ingenious contrivances, by which 
an image of some beautiful form may be made to pass from 
one visible place to another, were to contend that all the 
magnificent radiations of that more than ethereal splendour 
which does not merely adorn the day, but constitutes the 
day, had their primary origin in reflection, when reflection 
itself implies, and cannot be understood but as implying, 
the previous incidence, and therefore the previous existence 
of the light which is reflected. A mirror presents to us a 
fainter copy of external things ; but it is a copy which it 
presents. We are in like manner, to each other, mirrors 
that reflect from breast to breast joy, sorrow, indignation, 
and all the vivid emotions of which the individual mind is 
susceptible ; but though, as mirrors, we mutually give and 
receive emotions, these emotions must have been felt before 
they could be communicated. To ascribe original moral 
feelings to this mental reflection, is truly, then, as much 
an error, in the theory of morality, as the doctrine of the 
production of light by reflection without the previous 
incidence of light, would be an error in the theory of 
catoptrics. 

The argument, after the fuller views of it which I have 
given, may be recapitulated in very brief compass. 

There are only two senses in which sympathy can be 
understood ; one having immediate relation to the feelings, 
the other to the situation, of him with whom we are said 
to sympathize. We partake his emotions directly, as if 
by instant contagion ; or we partake them indirectly, by 
first imagining ourselves in the circumstances in which he 
is placed; the emotion, in this latter case, being similar 
merely because the situation, in which we imagine our- 
selves for the moment, is similar, and arising in us when 
the situation is imagined to be ours, precisely in the same 



OF MORAL APPROBATION. 



163 



manner, and according to the same principles, as it arose 
in the mind of him who truly existed in the circumstances 
in which our imagination only has placed us. In either 
case it is equally evident, that sympathy cannot be the 
source of any additional knowledge ; it only gives a wider 
diffusion to feelings that previously exist, or that might 
have previously existed. If it reflect to us the very 
emotions of others, as if by contagion, without any 
intervening influence of imagination on our part, it 
reflects feelings that have been directly excited in them, 
the primary subjects of the feelings, by their real situation ; 
and which they would not the less have had, though no one 
had been present to sympathize with them, or even though 
the tendency to sympathy had not formed a part of the 
mental constitution. If, on the other hand, sympathy do 
not reflect to us the very emotions of others, but make us 
first enter, by a sort of spiritual transmigration, into their 
situation, and thus indirectly impress us with their feelings ; 
it still, in making their situation ours, while the illusion 
lasts, excites in us only the feelings which we should have 
had, if the situation had been really ours ; and which the 
same tendencies to emotion that produce them now would 
then have produced, though no sympathy whatever had 
been concerned in the process. All which is peculiar to 
the sympathy is, that instead of one mind only, affected 
with certain feelings, there are two minds affected with 
certain feelings, and a recognition of the similarity of these 
feelings ; a similarity which, far from being confined to 
our moral emotions, may occur as readily and as frequently 
in every other feeling of which the mind is susceptible. 
What produces the moral notions, therefore, must evidently 
be something more than a recognition of similarity of 
feeling which is thus common to feelings of every class. 
There must be an independent capacity of moral emotion, 
in consequence of which we judge those sentiments of 
conduct to be right which coincide with sentiments of 



164 



RECAPITULATION OF THE DOCTRINES 



conduct previously recognised as right, or the sentiments 
of others to be improper, because they are not in unison 
with those which we previously distinguished as proper. 
Sympathy, then, may be the diffuser of moral sentiments, 
as of various other feelings ; but if no moral sentiments 
exist previously to our sympathy, our sympathy itself 
cannot give rise to them. 

Such, in outline, is the great objection to Dr. Smith's 
theory, as a theory of our moral sentiments. It professes 
to explain, by the intervention of sympathy, feelings which 
must have existed previously to the sympathy, or at least, 
without the capacity of which, as original feelings, in the 
real circumstances supposed, the illusive reality which 
sympathy produces would have been incapable of develop- 
ing them. It is on a mere assumption then, or rather on 
an inconsistency still more illogical than a mere assumption, 
that the great doctrine of his system is founded ; yet 
notwithstanding this essential defect, which might seem 
to you inconsistent with the praise that was given when I 
entered on the examination of it, the work of Dr. Smith 
is, without all question, one of the most interesting works, 
perhaps I should have said the most interesting work, in 
moral science. It is valuable, however, as I before 
remarked, not for the leading doctrine of which we have 
seen the futility, but for the minor theories which are 
adduced in illustration of it, for the refined analysis which 
it exhibits in many of these details, and for an eloquence 
which, adapting itself to all the temporary varieties of its 
subject, familiar with a sort of majestic grace, and simple 
even in its magnificence, can play amid the little decencies 
and proprieties of common life, or rise to all the dignity of 
that sublime and celestial virtue which it seems to bring 
from heaven indeed, but to bring down gently and humbly 
to the humble bosom of man. 

That his own penetrating mind should not have discovered 
the inconsistencies that are involved in his theory, and that 



OF MORAL APPROBATION. 



165 



these should not have readily occured to the many philoso- 
phic readers and admirers of his work, may in part have 
arisen, as many other seeming wonders of the kind have 
arisen, from the ambiguities of language. The meaning of 
the important word sympathy is not sufficiently definite, 
so as to present always one clear notion to the mind. It 
is generally employed, indeed, to signify a mere participa- 
tion of the feelings of others ; but it is also frequently used 
as significant of approbation itself. To say that we 
sympathize with any one in what he has felt or done, 
means often that we thoroughly approve of his feelings ; 
and in consequence of this occasional use of the term as 
synonymous with approbation, the theory which would 
identify all our moral approbation with sympathy, was, I 
cannot but think, more readily admitted, both by its 
author, and by those who have followed him ; since what 
was not true of sympathy, in its strict philosophic sense, 
was yet true of it in its mixed popular sense. Indeed, if 
the word had been always strictly confined to its two 
accurate meanings, as significant either of the mere direct 
participation of feelings previously existing, or of the 
indirect participation of them in consequence of the illusive 
belief of similarity of circumstances, it seems to me as 
little possible that any one should have thought of 
ascribing to sympathy original feelings, as, in the analogous 
cases which I before instanced, of ascribing to an echo the 
original utterance of the voices which it sends to oar ear, 
or the production of the colours which it sends to our 
eye to the mirror which has only received and reflected 
them. 

Of all the principles of our mixed nature, sympathy is 
perhaps one of the most irregular, varying not in different 
individuals only, but even in the same individual in 
different hours or different minutes of the same day, and 
varying, not with slight differences, but with differences of 
promptness and liveliness, with which only feelings the 



166 



RECAPITULATION OF THE DOCTRINES 



most capricious could be commensurable. If our virtue 
and vice, therefore, or our views of actions as right or 
wrong, varied with our sympathy, we might be virtuous at 
morning, vicious at noon, and virtuous again at night, 
without any change in the circumstances of our action, 
except in our greater or less tendency to vividness of 
sympathy, or to the expectation of more or less vivid 
sympathies in others. How absurd and impertinent seems 
to us, in our serious hours, the mirth that in more careless 
moments would have won from us not our smile only, but 
our full sympathy of equal laughter ; and how dull, when 
our own mind is sportive, seems to us the gravity of the 
sad and serious, of the venerable moralizers on years that 
are long passed, and years that are present, — to whose 
chair, under the influence of any sorrow that depressed us, 
we loved to draw our own, while we felt a sort of comfort 
as we listened to them, in the slow and tranquil tone, and 
the gentle solemnity of their fixed but placid features. 
What is true of our sympathy with mere mirth or sadness, 
is true of every other species of sympathy. Original 
temperament, habit, the slightest accident of good or bad 
fortune, may modify in no slight degree the readiness, or at 
least the liveliness, of moral sympathy with which we 
should have entered into the feelings of others, into their 
gratitude or anger, or common love or hate ; and if, 
therefore, our estimate of the propriety or impropriety of 
actions had been altogether dependent on the force of our 
mere sympathetic emotion, it would not have been very 
wonderful if the greater number of mankind had regarded 
the very propriety or impropriety, as not less accidental 
than the sympathies from which they flowed. 

Having now, then, examined all the systems of philo- 
sophers which may be considered as more or less directly 
opposed to the simple view which I gave you of our moral 
constitution, in which our notions of moral obligation, 
virtue, merit, were traced to a single feeling of the miud, 



OF MORAL APPROBATION. 



and the susceptibility of this feeling found to be as truly 
original in the mind as any of its other powers or suscepti- 
bilities — its capacity, for example, of memory, judgment, 
love, hate, hope, fear — I flatter myself, that the evident 
inadequacy of every system which professes to account for 
the moral phenomena, without this original distinctive 
principle, will be regarded as at least a strong corroboration 
of the positive evidence of the theory which has been 
submitted to you. The review in which we have been 
engaged may, therefore, I hope, be of double value, both as 
giving you a sketch of the opinions of the most eminent 
philosophers who have written on this most interesting 
subject, and an exposition of the errors of those opinions, 
which in many instances it requires considerable minuteness 
of analysis to detect, and as enabling you, at the same time, 
better to appreciate the truth of those original distinctions 
of moral good and evil, the belief of which seems to me as 
just in philosophy as it is salutary in its practical tendencies, 
and delightful to the heart that loves virtue ; and that, 
feeling in itself all the blessings which virtue diffuses, 
perceives with joy that the principle which gives to life all 
its happiness, is a principle that does not depend for its 
development on accidents of worldly station, or time or 
place, but in all regions, and ages, and circumstances of 
fortune, is coeval with the race of man, and present with 
its joys or consolations, which it is always ready to offer to 
our very wishes, wherever a human being exists. 

The review itself, however — important as it may have 
been in its relation to the history of moral science, and to 
the great truths which it is the object of moral science to 
develop and illustrate — has presented to your attention so 
many explanations, or rather so many attempted explana- 
tions, of the same moral phenomena, that the rapid 
succession of these different opinions may have tended, 
perhaps — at least in the minds of such of you as are not 
accustomed to consider together and compare many dis- 



J 68 RECAPITULATION OF THE DOCTRINES 



cordant systems — to perplex and obscure the notions 
which you had derived from the view of the subject as 
it was originally presented to you. It may be of advan- 
tage, therefore, to take a short retrospect of our original 
speculation. 

In surveying either our own conduct, or the conduct of 
others, we do not regard the actions that come under our 
review as merely useful or hurtful, in the same manner as 
we regard inanimate things, or parts even of our living 
mental constitution, that are independent of our will. 
There is a peculiar set of emotions, to which the actions of 
voluntary agents in certain circumstances give rise, that 
are the source of our moral sentiments, or rather which are 
themselves our moral sentiments, when considered in 
reference to the actions that excite them. To these 
emotions we give the name of moral approbation or moral 
disapprobation, feelings that are of various degrees of 
vividness as the actions which we consider are various. 
The single principle on which these feelings depend, is the 
source of all our moral notions ; one feeling of approbation, 
as variously regarded in time, being all which is truly 
meant when we speak of moral obligation, virtue, merit, 
that, in the works of ethical writers, are commonly treated 
as objects of distinct inquiry ; and that, in consequence of 
the distinct inquiries to which they have led, and the vain 
attempts to discover essential differences where none truly 
exist, have occasioned so much confusion of thought and 
verbal tautology as to throw a sort of darkness on morality 
itself. Instead, then, of inquiring first, what it is which 
constitutes virtue, and then what it is which constitutes 
merit, and then what it is which constitutes our moral 
obligation to do what we have seen to be right and 
meritorious, we found that one inquiry alone was necessary 
—what actions excite in us, when contemplated, a certain 
vivid feeling — since this approving sentiment alone, in its 
various references, is all which we seek in these different 



OF MORAL APPROBATION. 1 69 

verbal inquiries. If a particular action be meditated by 
us, and we feel, on considering it, that it is one of those 
which, if performed by us, will be followed in our own 
mind by the painful feeling of self-reproach, and in the 
minds of others by similar disapprobation ; if a different 
action be meditated by us, and we feel that our performance 
of it would be followed in our own mind and the minds of 
others by an opposite emotion of approbation, this view 
of the moral emotions that are consequences of the actions 
is that which I consider as forming what is termed moral 
obligation, the moral inducement which we feel to the 
performance of certain actions, or to abstinence from certain 
other actions. We are virtuous if we act in conformity 
with this view of moral obligation ; we are vicious if we 
act in opposition to it ; virtuous and vicious meaning 
nothing more than the intentional performance of actions 
that excite, when contemplated, the moral emotions. Our 
action, in the one case, we term morally right, in the other 
case morally wrong ; right and wrong, like virtue and vice, 
being only words that express briefly the actions which are 
attended with the feeling of moral approbation in the one 
case, of moral disapprobation in the other case. When we 
speak of the merit of any one, or of his demerit, we do not 
suppose any thing to be added to the virtue or vice ; we 
only express, in other words, the fact, that he has performed 
the action which it was virtuous or vicious to perform ; the 
action which, as contemplated by us, excites our approval, 
or the emotion that is opposite to that of approval. Moral 
obligation, virtue, vice, right, wrong, merit, demerit, and 
whatever other words may be synonymous with these, all 
denote then, as you perceive, relations to one simple feeling 
of the mind, the distinctive sentiment of moral approbation 
or disapprobation, which arises on the contemplation of 
certain actions ; and which .seems itself to be various, only 
because the action of which we speak or think, meditated, 
willed, or already performed, is variously regarded by us, 

I 



170 



RECAPITULATION OF THE DOCTRINES 



in time, as future, present, past. There are, in short, certain 
actions which cannot be contemplated without the instant 
feeling of approval, and which may therefore be denominated 
morally right. To feel this character of approvableness in 
an action which we have not yet performed, and are only 
meditating on it as future, is to feel the moral obligation or 
moral inducement to perform it ; when we think of the 
action in the moment of volition, we term the voluntary 
performance of it virtue ; when we think of the action as 
already performed, we denominate it merit ; in all which 
cases, if we analyze our moral sentiment, we cannot fail to 
discern, that it is one constant feeling of moral approval, 
with which we have been impressed, that is varied only by 
the difference of the time at which we regard the action as 
future, immediate, or past. 

A great part of the confusion which has prevailed in the 
theory of morals, has arisen, I have little doubt, from in- 
distinctness of conception with respect to the identity or the 
difference of these moral notions of obligation, virtue, merit. 
Much of the confusion also, I have as little doubt, has 
arisen from the abuse of one very simple abstraction — that 
by which we consider an action as stripped of circumstances 
peculiar to an individual agent, and forming, as it were, 
something of itself, which could be an object of moral re- 
gard, independently of the agent. We thus learn to speak 
of actions that are absolutely right and relatively wrong, 
or absolutely wrong and relatively right ; that is to say, of 
actions which are right when the agent, with his particular 
views, is wrong ; and of agents that continue as meritorious 
as before, when their actions, in ordinary circumstances, 
would have been ranked in some degree of delinquency. 
Convenient as these distinctions may verbally have been 
in some cases, where brevity was the only advantage 
desired, they have had an injurious tendency in other more 
important respects, by leading the inconsiderate to suppose, 
that of actions which are thus at once right and wrong, the 



OF MORAL APPROBATION. 



171 



morality cannot be very stable and definite. I was careful, 
therefore, to point out to you the nature of the abstraction, 
and the futility of any distinction more than what is purely 
verbal, of absolute and relative rectitude. What is abso- 
lutely right is relatively right, what is relatively right is 
absolutely right. An action cannot excite feelings different 
from those which an agent excites, for it is itself the agent, 
or it is nothing. It is the brief expression of some agent, 
real or supposed, placed in certain circumstances, willing 
and producing certain effects ; and when an action, which 
in one set of circumstances is right, is said to be wrong in 
other circumstances, the action of which we speak, in the 
new circumstances supposed, is truly, as I showed you, a 
different action, in the only sense in which an action has 
any meaning, as significant of a living being having certain 
definite views, and producing certain definite effects. A 
clear view of this definition of an action, as uniformly com- 
prehending in it the notion of some agent, without whom 
it would be nothing — though, but for the general miscon- 
ception on the subject, it would seem to me so obvious as 
scarcely to require to be pointed out — is, in consequence of 
that general misconception, one of the most important views 
in the philosophy of morals which you can make familiar 
to your mind. It is no small progress in Ethics, as iu 
Physics, to have learned to distinguish accurately abstrac- 
tions from realities, to know that^an action is only another 
name for an agent in certain circumstances ; virtue, vice, 
only briefer expressions of an agent virtuous or vicious, 
that is to say, of an agent performing actions of which we 
and mankind in general approve or disapprove. Indeed, I 
scarcely know a single ethical writer, to whose mind the 
nature of these and other similar abstractions has been duly 
present, and who does not sometimes think, or at least 
speak, of virtue and vice, as beings that have certain pro- 
perties, independently of all the virtuous and vicious in the 
universe. 



172 RECAPITULATION OF THE DOCTRINES 



Though there is not rice or virtue, however, there are 
virtuous or vicious agents. Certain actions, as soon as 
considered, excite a feeling of approbation, which leads us 
to class them together as virtuous ; certain other actions 
excite a feeling of moral disapprobation, which leads us 
to class them together as vicious. There is, then, in the 
mind of each individual, a principle which leads him thus 
to divide actions into two great classes. But if, in the 
minds of different individuals, this distinction were very 
differently formed, so that the actions which seemed virtues 
to one were the very actions which seemed vices to another, 
it is evident that the social happiness, and even the social 
union of mankind, could not be preserved in this strange 
mixture of love and hate, of crimes and virtues, rewarded 
or punished as the admirers of truth or deceit, of cruelty or 
benevolence, chanced to obtain a precarious superiority in 
numbers or power. It is necessary for general peace, even 
though no other relation were to be considered, that there 
should be some great rules of conduct, according to which 
all may direct their actions in one harmonious course of 
virtue ; or according to which, at least, in any partial dis- 
cord of the actions of individuals, the moral sentiment of 
the community may be harmoniously directed, in checking 
what would be generally injurious, and furthering what 
would be generally beneficial. There is, therefore, we found, 
such an accordance of sentiment — of sentiment that is 
directed by the provident benevolence of God to the happi- 
ness of all who live in the great social communion of man- 
kind, even when the individual, acting in conformity with 
the sentiment, has no thought beyond the sufferer whose 
anguish he relieves, or the friend to whose happiness he 
feels it more than happiness to contribute, or the preserva- 
tion of his own internal character of moral excellence, in 
cases in which pain is encountered or pleasure sacrificed 
with no other object than that moral excellence itself. 
Since the world was created there have indeed been myriads 



OF MORAL APPROBATION. 



of human beings on the earth ; but there has been only one 
God, and there is only one God. There is, therefore, only 
one great voice of approbation in all the myriads of man- 
kind ; because He, the great approver and the great former 
of our moral constitution, is one. We may refrain from 
virtue ; we may persecute virtue ; but, though our actions 
may be the actions of hatred, there is a silent reverence 
which no hatred can suppress. The omnipresent Judge of 
human actions speaks in the cause of the wicked as in the 
cause of the good, and has made it impossible for us, even 
in the wildest abuses of our power, not to revere, at least 
in heart, the virtue which he has honoured with his love. 

In asserting the wide accordance of this moral voice, 
however, it was necessary to consider the objections to the 
harmony of sentiment which have been drawn from some 
practices and institutions that seem, at least as first consi- 
dered, to be proofs of discord rather than harmony. That 
there are instances, and many instances, of such apparent 
anomaly, it would have been absurd to endeavour to dis- 
prove. But it might still be inquired, whether even these 
instances are really anomalous, or only seem so from errone- 
ous opinions of the nature of that modified agreement which 
alone is necessary to the supporter of the original tenden- 
cies, — distinctive emotions of vice and virtue. 

This consideration of the species of accordance which the 
moral phenomena might, from our knowledge of the general 
nature of the mind, be expected to indicate, on the suppo- 
sition of an original principle of moral feeling, led us into 
some very interesting trains of inquiry ; of which the re- 
sult was the ascertainment of certain limits, within which 
remains, unaffected by the sophistries opposed to it, all that 
uniformity for which it is wisdom to contend, — limits that 
do not imply any defect of original tendency to certain 
moral emotions, but only the operation of other causes, 
that concur with this original influence ; and that might, 
a priori^ have been expected to have this modifying effect ; 



174 RECAPITULATION OF THE DOCTRINES 



if, without considering any of the objections urged, we had 
only reflected on the analogous phenomena of other princi- 
ples of the mind, that are allowed to be essential to it and 
universal, and that are yet capable of similar modification. 

The limitations to which we were led were of three kinds, 
— first, the temporary influence of every feeling that com- 
pletely occupies the mind, especially of any violent passion, 
which blinds us at the moment to moral distinctions, — that 
is to say, prevents, by its own vividness, the rise of the less 
vivid feelings of approbation or disapprobation ; in the 
same manner as, in similar circumstances, it would blind to 
the discernment even of the universal truths of science, — 
that is to say, would not allow us to perceive for the time 
the simplest and least mutable of all relations, — the pro- 
portions of number and quantity, — if an arithmetician or 
geometer, when we were under the influence of anger, sud- 
den jealousy, or any other violent emotion, were to discourse 
to us calmly of square or cube roots, or of the properties of 
right-angled triangles. These arithmetical or geometrical 
properties we discover readily, when our passion has sub- 
sided ; and, in like manner, we discover readily, when our 
passion has wholly subsided, the moral distinctions which 
we were incapable of perceiving before. 

A second limitation, which we found it necessary to form, 
arises from the complex results of good and evil, in a single 
action, — the difficulty of calculating the preponderance of 
good or evil, according to which felt preponderance alone, 
our approbation or disapprobation arises, — and the various 
degrees of importance attached, and justly attached, in 
different ages and nations, to parts of the complex results, 
which are most in harmony with the spirit of the nation or 
the age ; that is to say, which tend, or are conceived to 
tend, most to the production of that particular national good 
which it may have been an error in policy, indeed, to de- 
sire, but which still was the object of a policy, wise or 
unwise. What we esteem evil upon the whole, others may 



OF MORAL APPROBATION. 



175 



esteem good upon the whole ; because there is, in truth, a 
mixture of good and evil, the parts of which may he vari- 
ously estimated, hut of which no one loves the evil as evil, 
or hates the good as good. It is some form of good, which 
is present to the mind of the agent, when he regards as 
morally right, that compound result of good and evil, of 
which we, with better discernment, appreciate better the 
relative amount. Even the atrocious virtues, if I may use 
that combination of words, of which voyagers relate to us 
instances in savage life, or which have sometimes prevailed 
even in nations more civilized, we found in our inquiry, 
might very naturally, without any defect, or inconsistency 
of moral emotion, arise from some misconception of this 
sort. Vices may every where be found prevailing as vices; 
but when they are generally revered as virtues, it is because 
there is in them something which is truly, in those circum- 
stances, virtue, however inferior the amount of good may 
be to the amount of evil. It is for some prominent moral 
good, however, that they are approved ; and the defective 
analysis, which does not perceive the amount of accompany- 
ing evil, is an error of judgment, not an approbation of 
that which is injurious to individuals or mankind, for the 
sake of that very injury. 

The third limitation which we were led to form, is that 
which arises from the influence of the associating' principle, 
— an influence that concurs with the former in almost every 
instance, and promotes it. When actions have complicated 
results, this principle may lead us to think more of one 
part of the result than of another part ; and, by the remem- 
brances which it yields of the virtues of those whom we 
have loved, adds all the force of its own lively impressions 
to the particular virtues that are so recommended to us, or 
to actions that might otherwise have been absolutely indif- 
ferent. This influence, however, far from disproving the 
reality of original tendencies to moral feeling, is, as I show- 
ed you, in many of the eases in which it operates most 



176 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



powerfully, one of the most interesting exemplifications of 
these very moral emotions. It is by loving those whom it 
is virtue to love, that we learn often to value too highly, 
what otherwise we should have valued with a juster esti- 
mate. The same principle we found too to operate strongly 
in exciting, through the medium of general terms and gene- 
ral rules, a disproportionate emotion in some cases, in which 
we have learned to apply to individual cases an emotion 
that has resulted from many previous analogous emotions. 

Such are the limits within which alone the original ten- 
dency of our nature to certain moral emotions, and the 
consequent accordance of moral distinctions can be defended, 
— but within these limits it may safely be maintained. 
There is in our breast a susceptibility of moral emotion, by 
which we approve or condemn ; and the principle which 
thus approves or condemns in us, is the noblest of the ties 
that connect us with the universal community of mankind. 



LECTURE X. 

OF THE USE OP THE TERM MORAL SENSE ; ARRANGEMENT OF THE 
PRACTICAL VIRTUES. 

In my last Lecture, after concluding my remarks 
on the theory of our moral sentiments which Dr. Smith has 
proposed, — the last of the theories on this subject which 
required our consideration, as differing in its principles from 
the view which I have given you, — I briefly recapitulated 
the general doctrines which we had previously been led to 
form of the phenomena of moral approbation. 

All our moral sentiments, then, of obligation, virtue, 
merit, are in themselves, as we have seen, nothing more 
than one simple feeling, variously referred to actions, m 



MORAL SENSE. 177 

future, present, or past. With the loss of the susceptibility 
of this one peculiar species of emotion, all practical morality 
would instantly cease : for, if the contemplation of actions 
excited in us no feeling of approval, no foresight, that, by 
omitting to perform them, we should regard ourselves, and 
others would regard us, with abhorrence or contempt, or at 
least with disapprobation, it would be absurd to suppose 
that there could be any moral obligation to perform certain 
actions and not to perform certain other actions, which 
seemed to us, morally, equal and indifferent. There could, 
in like manner, be no virtue nor vice in performing, and 
no merit nor demerit in having performed an action, the 
omission of which would have seemed to the agent as little 
proper, or as little improper as the performance of it, — in 
that state of equal indiscriminate regard or disregard, in 
which the plunderer and the plundered, the oppressor and 
the oppressed, were considered only as the physical pro- 
ducers of a different result of happiness or misery. 

It is by this one susceptibility, then, of certain vivid dis- 
tinctive emotions, that we become truly moral beings, united, 
under the guardianship of Heaven, in one great social system, 
benefiting and benefited, and not enjoying the advantage 
of this mutual protection only in the protection itself, that 
is constantly around us, but enjoying also the pleasure of 
affording the reciprocal benefit, and even a sort of pleasure 
of no slight amount, in the various wants themselves, which 
are scarcely felt as wants, when we know that they are to 
be remedied by the kind hearts and gentle hands whose 
offices of aid we have before delighted to receive, and are 
in perfect confidence of again receiving. Such is the great 
system of social duties that connects mankind by ties, of 
which our souls do not feel the power less truly, because 
they are ties which only the soul can feel, and which do 
not come within the sphere of our bodily perception. By 
that delightful emotion, which follows the contemplation of 
virtue, we can enjoy it, even while it is not exercised, in 

i 2 



178 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



all its aspects, as past, or future, as much as present. In 
our meditations on it, it is like some tranquil delight that 
awaits us, which, in the very act of virtue, comes like an 
immediate reward to actions that seem to need no other 
recompense, while they are thus rewarded ; and to look 
back upon the generous toil, or the generous self-privation* 
as among the things which have been, is at once to enjoy 
again the past delight, and to feel in it a sort of pledge of 
future returns of similar enjoyment, — increased trust of 
being able and worthy to perform again, whenever the 
opportunity of them shall recur, actions as worthy of 
delight, and as delightful. 

It is by this unceasing delight, which Virtue is ever 
spreading out before us, not merely in the direct exercise 
of the actions which we term virtuous, but in the contem- 
plation of them as future in our wishes, or as past, in the 
remembrances of a good conscience, that moral excellence 
is truly and philosophically worthy of the glorious distinc- 
tion, by which the author of the Essay on Man would 
characterize it, of being what " alone is happiness below. 5 ' 

The only point where human bliss stands still, 
And tastes the good, without the fall to ill ; 
Where only Merit constant pay receives. 
Is blest, in what it takes and what it gives ; 
The joy unequalPd, if its end it gain, 
And, if it lose, attended with no pain ; 
Without satiety, though e'er so blest, 
And but more relish'd, as the more distress'd ; 
The broadest mirth unfeeling Folly wears, 
Less pleasing far than Virtue's very tears ; 
Good from each object, from each place acquired, 
For ever exercised, yet never tired ; 
Never elated, while one man's oppress'd, 
Never dejected, while another's blest ; 
And where no wants, no wishes, can remain, 
Since but to wish more virtue is to gain. 

In tracing to an original susceptibility of the mind our 



MORAL SENSE. 



179 



moral feelings of obligation in the conception of certain 
actions as future, of virtue in the present performance or 
wish to perform certain actions, and of merit in the past 
performance or past resolution to perform certain actions, 
we may be considered as arriving at a principle like that 
which Dr. Hutcheson, after Lord Shaftesbury, has distin- 
guished by the name of the Moral Sense, and of which, as 
an essential principle of our constitution, he has defended 
the reality with so much power of argument, in his various 
works on morals. In our moral feelings, however, I dis- 
cover no peculiar analogy to perceptions or sensations, in 
the philosophic meaning of those terms ; and the phrase 
moral sense, therefore, I consider as having had a very 
unfortunate influence on the controversy as to the original 
moral differences of actions, from the false analogies 
which it cannot fail to suggest. Were I to speak of a moral 
sense at present, you would understand me as speaking 
rather metaphorically, than according to the real place 
which we should be inclined to give, in our arrangement, to 
the original principle of our nature, on which the moral 
emotions depend. But by Hutcheson it was asserted to be 
truly and strictly a sense, as much a sense as any of those 
which are the source of our direct external perceptions ; 
and though this difference of nomenclature and of arrange- 
ment on his part, evidently arose from a misconception, or, 
at least, a very loose meaning of the word sense, different 
from that in which it is commonly understood, as limited 
to the feelings which we acquire directly from affections of 
our bodily organs, still this loose meaning of the term which 
he intended it to convey, was, in some measure, mingled 
and confused in the minds of others, with the stricter mean- 
ing commonly assigned to it ; and the assertion of a moral 
sense has been regarded almost as the assertion of the ex- 
istence of some primary medium of perception, which con- 
veys to us directly moral knowledge, as the eye enables us 
to distinguish directly the varieties of colours, or the ear 



180 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



the varieties of sounds ; and the scepticism, which would 
have been just with respect to such an organ of exclusive 
moral feeling, has been unfortunately extended to the certain 
moral principle itself, as an original principle of our nature. 
Of the impropriety of ascribing the moral feelings to a 
sense, I am fully aware then, and the place which I have 
assigned to them among the moral phenomena is, therefore, 
very different. In the emotions, which the contemplation 
of the voluntary actions of those around us produces, there 
is nothing that seems to demand, for the production of such 
emotions, a peculiar sense, more than is to be found in any 
of our other emotions. Certain actions excite in us, when 
contemplated, the vivid feelings which we express too 
coldly when, from the poverty of language, we term them 
approbation or disapprobation, and which are not estimates 
formed by an approving or disapproving judgment, but 
emotions that accompany and give warmth to such estimates. 
Certain other objects of thought excite in us other vivid 
feelings that are in like manner classed as emotions, — hope, 
jealousy, resentment ; and, therefore, if all emotions, ex- 
cited by the contemplation of objects, were to be referred 
to a peculiar sense, we might as well speak of a sense of 
those emotions, or of a sense of covetousness or despair, as of 
a sense of moral regard. If sense, indeed, were understood 
in this case to be synonymous with mere susceptibility, so 
that, when we speak of a moral sense, we were to be un- 
derstood to mean only a susceptibility of moral feeling of 
some sort, we might be allowed to have a sense of morals, 
because we have, unquestionably, a susceptibility of moral 
emotion ; but in this very wide extension of the term, we 
might be said, in like manner, to have as many senses as 
we have feelings of any sort ; since, in whatever manner 
the mind may have been affected, it must have had a 
previous susceptibility of being so affected, as much as in 
the peculiar affections that are denominated moral. 
The great error of Dr. Ilutcheson, and of other writers 



MORAL SENSE. 



181 



who treat of the susceptibility of moral emotion, under the 
name of the moral sense, appears to me to consist in their 
belief of certain moral qualities in actions, which excite in 
us what they -consider as ideas of these qualities, in the 
same manner as external things give us, not merely pain or 
pleasure, but notions or ideas of hardness, form, colour. 
Indeed, it is on this account that the great champion of 
this doctrine professes to regard the moral principle as a 
sense ; from its agreement, as he says, with this definition, 
which he conceives to be the accurate definition of a sense, 
" a determination of the mind to receive any idea from the 
presence of an object, which occurs to us independent on 
our will." What he terms an idea, in this case, is nothing 
more than an emotion considered in its relation to the action 
which has excited it. A certain action is considered by 
us — a certain emotion arises. There is no idea in the philo- 
sophic meaning of that term, but of the agent himself and 
of the circumstances in which he was placed, and the phy- 
sical changes produced by him ; and our ideas or notions 
of these we owe to other sources. To the moral principle, 
the only principle of which Hutcheson could mean to speak 
as a moral sense, we owe the emotion itself, and nothing 
but the emotion. 

In one use of the word, indeed, we may be said to owe 
to our susceptibility of moral emotion, ideas, because we 
owe to it, as the primary source, the emotions of this 
species which we remember; and remembrances of past 
feelings are often termed ideas of those feelings : but in this 
application of the word, as synonymous with a mere 
remembrance, every feeling, as capable of being remem- 
bered, may be a source of ideas independently of the will, 
and therefore, according to the definition which is given 
by Hutcheson, equally a sense. 

There is yet another meaning of the word, however, and 
a still more important one, in relation to our present 
inquiry, in which our susceptibility of moral emotion is 



182 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



productive of what, in the general loose language of 
metaphysical writers, have been termed ideas ; and it is by 
his defective analysis of what is truly meant in the phrase 
moral ideas, and of the process which evolves them, that 
I conceive Hutcheson to have been chiefly misled, in 
supposing us to be endowed with a sense of moral qualities 
of actions. The process to which I allude, is the common 
process of generalization, to which alone we owe the general 
notions of virtue, vice, right and wrong, which he ascribes 
to a particular sense that affords us these ideas. If we had 
never contemplated more than a single virtuous or vicious 
action, we should have had only the particular emotion 
which followed that particular contemplation, and should as 
little have formed the general notions of virtue and vice, 
as we should have formed the notion which is expressed by 
the word quadruped, if we had seen only a single animal 
with four legs. It is not by one action only of one definite 
kind, however, that is to say, by an agent placed only in 
one set of circumstances, and producing only one particular 
effect, that our moral emotion is excited ; nor is there only 
one unvarying feeling of the mind, of one exact degree of 
intensity, which we denominate a moral emotion, as excited 
by various moral actions. There are various analogous 
actions which excite various analogous moral feelings of 
approbation or disapprobation ; and it is in consequence of 
the feeling of the similarity of these emotions, that we 
learn to class together the different actions that excite these 
similar emotions under a single word, virtuous, or right, or 
proper, or vicious, wrong, improper. The ideas, of which 
Hutcheson speaks, are these general notions only. There 
are virtuous agents, not virtue, as there are minds that have 
certain feelings, approving or disapproving, not approba- 
tion or disapprobation, as one simple state, in all the 
varieties of these feelings. Virtue, vice, right and wrong, 
are, in short, mere general terms, as much as any other 
mere general terms, which we have formed to express the 



MORAL SENSE. 



183 



similarities of particular things or particular qualities. 
The general notions, and consequently the general terms, 
that denote them, we derive indeed from our susceptibility 
of moral feeling, since we must have the moral emotions 
themselves, before we can discover them to be like or unlike, 
and invent words for expressing briefly their similarities ; 
but what Dr. Hutcheson and other writers would term our 
ideas of virtue and vice, right and wrong, — though, in this 
sense, derived from our susceptibility of moral feeling, 
which gives us the emotions that are felt and classed as 
similar, — are derived from it, only as any other general 
notions of resemblances of any other feelings, or of the 
circumstances which induce in the mind certain similar 
feelings, necessarily presuppose the capacity of the feelings 
themselves, whatever they may be, which are afterwards 
considered as having this relation of similarity. There are 
no two feelings, perhaps, which may not be found to have 
some relation to each other, as there are, perhaps, no two 
external things which may not be found to have some 
analogy; and if, therefore, we suppose that we have a 
particular internal sense for every general notion of agree- 
ment of any kind, which we are capable of framing, we 
may be said to have as many senses as we have pairs of 
feeling which we are capable of comparing. There are 
innumerable similarities which are felt by us every hour, 
and consequently innumerable general notions, though we 
may have invented names only for a few of them. Our 
moral emotions, like our other emotions, and our other 
feelings of every kind, impress us with certain resemblances 
which they mutually bear ; and the importance of the 
actions which agree in exciting the analogous feelings of 
moral approbation or disapprobation, from the influence 
which they widely exercise on happiness as beneficial or 
injurious, has led, in every age and country, to the desig- 
nation of them by certain general names, as virtuous or 
vicious, proper or improper ; but these general terms are 



184 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



not the less general terms, and only general terms, signifi- 
cant merely of the resemblance of various particular actions, 
which agree in exciting in the mind certain feelings that 
are analogous. This distinction of virtue, vice, right, 
wrong, merit, demerit, as mere general terms, expressive 
only of an analogous relation which certain actions bear 
to certain emotions, I conceive to be of the utmost im- 
portance for your clear understanding of the theory of 
morals ; and I have dwelt on it, therefore, with the wish 
that it should become familiar to your minds. You are not 
to conceive, as Dr. Hutcheson's view of our moral feelings 
might lead you to imagine, that we discover a certain idea 
of right or wrong, virtue or vice, from the contemplation 
of any one particular action, as if there were a sense for the 
reception of such ideas, that flow from them like light from 
the sun, or fragrant particles from a rose. There is no right 
or wrong, virtue or vice, but there are agents whose actions 
cannot be contemplated by us without an emotion of 
approbation or disapprobation ; and all actions, that is to 
say, all agents, that agree in exciting moral feelings which 
are thus analogous, we class together as virtuous or vicious, 
from this circumstance of felt agreement alone. The 
similarity of the emotions which we feel, in these particular 
cases, is thus all to which we owe the notions, or, as Dr. 
Hutcheson calls them, the ideas, of right and wrong, virtue 
and vice ; and it is not more wonderful that we should form 
these general notions, than that we should form any other 
general notions whatever. 

The error of Dr. Hutcheson with respect to qualities, in 
objects that excite in us what he terms moral ideas, is 
similar to that which led many ethical writers — as we saw 
in reviewing their different systems — to refer our moral 
sentiments to reason or judgment, as the principle which 
measures the fitnesses of certain actions for producing 
certain ends ; and which approves or disapproves accord- 
ingly, as different actions seem more or less adapted for 



MORAL SENSE, 



185 



producing the desired end. The truth is, that moral 
approbation or disapprobation, though, from the common 
use of those terms, and the poverty of our language, I have 
been obliged to employ them in our past discussions, are 
terms that are very inadequate to express the liveliness of 
the moral feelings to which we give those names. The 
moral emotions are more akin to love or hate, than to 
perception or judgment. What we call our approbation of 
an action, inasmuch as the moral principle is concerned, 
is a sort of moral love when the action is the action of 
another, or moral complacency when the action is our own, 
and nothing more. It is no exercise of reason, discovering 
congruities, and determining one action to be better fitted 
than another action, for affording happiness or relieving 
misery. This logical or physical approbation may precede, 
indeed, the moral emotion, and may mingle with it, and 
continue to render it more and more lively while we are 
under its influence ; but even when such approbation 
precedes it, it is distinct from the emotion itself ; and we 
might judge and approve of the fitness, or disapprove of 
the unfitness, of certain actions to produce happiness, with 
the same precision as we now judge and approve, or 
disapprove, though we had not been, as we are, moral 
beings, desirous of the happiness of others, and feeling a 
vivid delightful emotion, on the contemplation of such 
actions as tend to produce that happiness. However our 
judgment, as mere judgment, may have been exercised 
before, in discerning the various relations of actions to the 
happiness of the world, the moral principle is the source 
only of the emotion which follows the discovery of such 
fitness ; and not in the slightest degree of the judgment 
which measures and calculates the fitness, any more than it 
is a source of the fitness itself. When we speak of our 
moral approbation of an action, we may indeed, from the 
convenience of such brief expressions, have some regard to 
both feelings, to our judgment of the fitness of an action 



186 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



to produce good to an individual or to the world, and to 
our moral love of the beneficial action which follows this 
discovery. But still, it is not to be forgotten, that it is the 
latter part only, the distinctive moral regard, that belongs 
to the principle which we have been considering ; the 
discovery of the fitness is a common exercise of judgment, 
that differs no more from the other exercises of it than 
these differ from each other. It is in the order of our 
emotions, accordingly, that I have assigned a place to our 
moral feelings, in my arrangement of the phenomena of 
the mind ; because, though we are accustomed to speak 
of moral approbation, moral judgments, or moral estimates 
of actions, the feelings which we thus comprehend under 
a single term are not the simple vivid feeling, which is all 
that truly constitutes the moral emotion, but a combination 
of this vivid feeling with the judgment as to the fitness or 
tendency of the action, which, as a mere judgment, preceded 
and gave rise to the emotion. What is strictly the moral 
part of the compound is, however, as I hare already said, 
the emotion, and the emotion only. 

There is, in this case, with respect to mere judgment, 
precisely the same error which we have traced in the 
reasons that led Dr. Hutcheson to the supposition of a 
moral sense. What are termed moral ideas of virtue, 
merit, obligation, — the consideration of which, as moral 
ideas, was, as his definition and his general reasoning 
show, the very circumstance which led him into his error, 
— are merely, as I have repeatedly endeavoured to demon- 
strate to you, the one vivid moral emotion, referred to the 
actions which excite it. There are no ideas, therefore, 
which require the supposition of a peculiar sense for afford- 
ing them, even if a sense were necessary for all those 
feelings which are termed simple ideas. There is only a 
particular emotion, indicating, of course, a peculiar suscepti- 
bility of this emotion in the mind ; and, together with this 
vivid feeling, actions, or ideas of certain actions, and their 



MORAL SENSE. 



187 



cousequences, which may be said, indeed, to be moral 
ideas, when combined with this vivid feeling, but which, 
as ideas, are derived from other sources. It is not the 
moral principle which sees the agent, and all the circum- 
stances of his action, or which sees the happiness or misery 
that has flowed from it ; but when these are seen, and all 
the motives of the agent divined, it is the moral principle 
of our nature which then affords the emotion that may 
afterwards, in our conception, be added to these ideas 
derived from other sources, and form with them compound 
notions of all the varieties of actions that are classed by us 
as forms of virtue or vice. 

The reference of our moral love of certain actions and 
moral abhorrence of other actions to a peculiar sense, termed 
the moral sense, has arisen, then, we may conclude, from a 
defective analysis, or at least from a misconception of the 
nature of those moral ideas of which the defenders of this 
sense speak, and which seem to them falsely to indicate the 
necessity of such a sense for affording them, The ideas of 
which they speak are truly complex feelings of the mind. 
We have only to perform the necessary analysis, and ail 
which we discover is a certain emotion of moral love, that, 
according to circumstances, is more or less lively, and the 
notion of certain actions, that is to say, of agents real or 
supposed, willing and producing certain effects. We may, 
for the sake of brevity, invent the general words virtue, 
right, propriety, as significant of all the actions which are 
followed in us by this emotion. But these are mere 
generalizations, like other generalizations ; and there is 
no virtue in nature, more than there is quadruped or 
substance. 

But, though Dr. Hutcheson may have erred in not 
analyzing with sufficient minuteness the moral ideas' of 
which he speaks, and in giving the name of a moral sense 
to the susceptibility of a mere emotion akin to our other 
emotions, this error is of little consequence as to the moral 



188 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



distinctions themselves. Whether the feeling that attends 
the contemplation of certain actions admit of being more 
justly classed with our sensations or perceptions, or with 
our emotions, there is still a susceptibility of this feeling or 
set of feelings, original in the mind, and as essential to its 
very nature as any other of the principles or functions, 
which we regard as universally belonging to our mental 
constitution ; as truly essential to the mind, indeed, as any 
of those senses among which Dr. Hutcheson would fix its 
place. 

The sceptical conclusions which some writers have 
conceived to be deducible from the doctrine of a moral 
sense, might, if they could be justly drawn from that 
doctrine, be equally deducible from the doctrine of moral 
emotions for which I have contended ; since the emotions 
may be regarded as almost the same feelings under a 
different name. A very slight notice, however, of the 
objection which these conclusions are supposed to furnish, 
will be sufficient for showing the radical error in which the 
objection has its source. You will find it stated and 
illustrated at great length in Dr. Price's elaborate, but very 
tedious, and not very clear, Review of the principal 
questions of morals. It is more briefly stated by Mr. 
Stewart in his Outlines. 

" From the hypothesis of a moral sense, various sceptical 
conclusions have been deduced by later writers. The 
words Right and Wrong, it has been alleged, signify 
nothing in the objects themselves to which they are applied, 
any more than the words sweet and bitter, pleasant and 
painful ; but only certain effects in the miud of the 
spectator. As it is improper, therefore, (according to the 
doctrines of modern philosophy,) to say of an object of taste, 
that it is sweet ; or of heat, that it is in the fire ; so it is 
equally improper to say of actions, that they are right 
or wrong. It is absurd to speak of morality as a thing 
independent and unchangeable : inasmuch as it arises from 



MORAL SENSE. 



189 



an arbitrary relation between our constitution and particular 
objects. 

" In order to avoid these supposed consequences of Dr. 
Hutcheson's philosophy, an attempt has been made by 
some later writers, in particular by Dr. Price, to revive 
the doctrines of Dr. Cudworth, and to prove, that moral 
distinctions, being perceived by reason or the under- 
standing, are equally immutable with all other kinds of 
truth." 1 

That right and wrong signify nothing in the objects 
themselves, is indeed most true. They are words expressive 
only of relation ; and relations are not existing parts of 
objects, or things, to be added to objects, or taken from 
them. There is no right nor wrong, virtue nor vice, merit 
nor demerit, existing independently of the agents who are 
virtuous or vicious ; and, in like manner, if there had been 
no moral emotions to arise on the contemplation of certain 
actions, there would have been no virtue, vice, merit, or 
demerit, which express only relations to these emotions. 
But though there be no right nor wrong in an agent, the 
virtuous agent is not the same as the vicious agent, — I do 
not say merely to those whom he benefits or injures, but to 
the most remote individual who contemplates that inten- 
tional production of benefit or injury. All are affected, on 
the contemplation of these, with different emotions ; and it 
is only by the difference of these moral emotions that these 
actions are recognised as morally different. We feel that 
it will be impossible, while the constitution of nature 
remains as it is, — and we may say, even from the traces of 
the divine benevolence which the universe displays, im- 
possible, while God himself, the framer of our constitution, 
and adapter of it to purposes of happiness, exists, — that 
the lover and intentional producer of misery, as misery, 
should ever be viewed with tender esteem ; or that he 



1 Outlines of Moral Philosophy, 4th edition, 8yo, p. 132. 



190 



OF THE tTSE OF THE TERM 



whose only ambition has been to diffuse happiness more 
widely than it could have flowed without his aid. should be 
regarded with the detes : n that account, which we 

now feel for the murderer of a single helpless individual, or 
for the oppressor of as many sufferers as a nation can 
contain in its whole wide orb of calamity : and a distinc- 
tion which is to exist while God himself exists, or at least 
which has been, and as we cannot but believe will be, 
coeval with the race of man. cannot surely be regarded as 
very precarious. It is not to moral distinctions only that 
this objection, if it had any force, would be applicable. 
Equality, proportion, it might be said, in like manner, 
signify nothing in the objects themselves to which they are 
applied, more than vice or virtue. They are as truly mere 
relations, as the relations of morality. Though the three 
sides of a right-angled triangle exist in the triangle itself^ 
and constitute it what it is, what we term the properties of 
such a triangle do not exist in it, but are results of a 
peculiar capacity of the comparing mind. It is man, or 
some thinking being like man, whose comparison gives 
birth to the very feeling that is termed by us a discovery 
of the equality of the squares of one of the sides to the 
squares of the other two ; that is to say, — for the discovery 
of this truth is nothing more, — it is man who. contemplating 
such a triangle, is impressed with this relation, and who 
feels afterwards that it would be impossible for him to 
contemplate it without such an impression. If this feeling 
of the relation never had arisen, and never were to arise 
in any mind, though the squares themselves might still 
exist as separate figures, their equality would be nothing. 
— exactly as justice and injustice would be nothing, where 
no relation of moral emotion had ever been felt ; for equality, 
like justice, is a relation not a thing ; and, if strictly 
analyzed, exists only, and can exist only, in the mind, 
which, on the contemplation of certain objects, is impressed, 
with certain feelings of relation: — in the same manner as 



MORAL SENSE. 



191 



right and wrong, virtue, vice, relate to emotions excited in 
some mind that has contemplated certain actions, — without 
whose contemplations of the actions, it will readily be 
confessed, there could be no right nor wrong, virtue nor 
vice, as there could be no other relation without a mind 
that contemplates the objects said to be related. Certain 
geometrical figures cannot be contemplated by us without 
exciting certain feelings of the contemplating mind, — which 
are notions of equality or proportion. Is it necessary that 
the equality should be itself something existing in the 
separate figures themselves, without reference to any mind 
that contemplates them, before we put any confidence in 
geometry ? Or is it not enough that every mind which 
does contemplate them together, is impressed with that 
particular feeling, in consequence of which they are ranked 
as equal ? And, if it be not necessary, in the case of a 
science which we regard as the surest of all sciences, that 
the proportions of figures should be any thing inherent in 
the figures, why should it be required, before we put 
confidence in morality, that right and wrong should be 
something existing in the individual agents ? It is not 
easy, indeed, to understand what is meant by such an 
inherence as is required in this postulate ; or what other 
relations actions can be supposed to have as right or wrong, 
than to the minds which are impressed by them with certain 
feelings. Of this, at least, we may be sure, that, if any 
doubt can truly exist as to relations which we and all 
mankind have felt, since the creation of the very race of 
man, — because, though, with our present constitution, we 
feel it impossible to consider cruelty as amiable, and 
greater cruelty as more amiable, we might, if the frame of 
our mind were altered, love the ferocity which we now 
detest, and fly from freedom and general benevolence, to 
take shelter in some more delightful waste, where there 
might be the least possible desire of good, and the least 
possible enjoyment of it, among plunderers whom we loved 



192 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



much, and murderers whom we loved and honoured more 
— if any doubt of this kind could truly be felt, the reference 
which Dr. Price would make, of our moral sentiments to 
reason, would leave the difficulty and the doubt exactly 
where they were before ; since reason is but a principle of 
our mental frame, like the principle which is the source of 
moral emotion, and has no peculiar claim to remain unaltered 
in the supposed general alteration of our mental constitu- 
tion. What we term reason, is only a brief expression of 
a number of separate feelings of relation, of which the mind 
might or might not have been formed to be susceptible. If 
the mind of man remain as it is, our moral feelings, in 
relation to their particular objects, are as stable as our 
feelings of any other class ; and if the mind of man be 
altered in all its functions, it is absurd for us to make 
distinctions of classes of feelings in the general dissolution 
of every thing which we at present know, — absurd even to 
guess at the nature of a state which arises from a change 
that is imaginary only, and that by our very supposition is 
to render us essentially different in every respect from the 
state with which we are at present acquainted. 

It is a very powerless scepticism, indeed, which begins 
by supposing a total change of our nature. We might, 
perhaps, have been formed to admire only the cruel, and to 
hate only the benevolent ; as in spite of an axiom, that 
now seems to us self-evident, we might all have been 
formed to think with the lunatic, that the cell in which he 
is confined is larger than the whole earth, of which it is a 
part What the mind of a single madman is, the minds of 
all men might certainly be > and we might no longer feel 
the same moral relations, as we might no longer feel the 
same geometrical relations of space. But if the moral 
distinctions be as regular as the whole system of laws which 
carry on in unbroken harmony the motions of the universe, 
this regularity is sufficient for us while we exist on earth ; 
and when we leave this earth, we carry with us a conscience 



MORAL SENSE. 



193 



which can have little fear, that the virtues which Heaven 
has made it so delightful for us to practise below, and 
which have been the chief instruments of producing a 
happiness which, when the universe was formed with such 
innumerable adaptations to the enjoyment of all who live, 
was surely not foreign to the intention of its Author, will, 
in that immortality, which is only a prolongation of this 
mortal life, be regarded with abhorrence by that great 
Being, whose perfections, however faintly, we have 
endeavoured to image, and who has here been so lavish to 
us of a love as constant in its approbation of moral good as 
the moral excellence which it has made happy. 

We have now, then, examined very fully the great 
question, as to the distinctions which we find man every 
where to have made of actions, as morally right or wrong ; 
and I trust, for the sake of your happiness in life at least, 
as much as for the accuracy of your philosophy, that you 
are not inclined to withhold your logical assent from the 
doctrine of the moral distinction of vice and virtue ; a 
doctrine which seems to me to have every character of 
truth as a faithful picture of the phenomena of the mind, 
and which it would therefore be as erroneous as it would 
be miserable to deny. 

Certain actions then excite, when considered by us, cer- 
tain emotions of moral regard. But what are those actions, 
and how are they to be arranged ? 

In this inquiry, which involves the whole doctrine of 
practical ethics, philosophers have been very generally mis- 
led by that spirit of excessive simplification, of which, in 
the course of the various discussions that have occupied us 
together, we have had occasion to remark many striking 
"^stances, and in part, too, by the influence of another 
erroi, which also we have had frequent occasion of remark- 
ing? — the^rror of considering mere abstractions as realities. 

In considering the emotion, or rather the various emo- 
tions excited by the various objects which are termed 

K 



194 



OF THE USE OF THE TERM 



beautiful, we observed the constant tendency of inquirers 
into these interesting phenomena, to suppose that there is 
one universal Beauty, which is diffused in all the objects 
that are termed beautiful, and forms, as it were, a consti- 
tuent part of themselves. 

One Beauty of the world entire, 
The universal Venus, — far beyond 
The keenest effort of created eyes, 
And their most wide horizon, — dwells enthroned 
In ancient Silence. At her footstool stands 
An altar burning with eternal fire, 
Unsullied, unconsumed. Here, every hour, 
Here, every moment, in their turns arrive 
Her offspring ; — an innumerable band 
Of sisters, comely all, but differing far 
In age, in stature, and expressive mien, 
More than bright Helen from her new-born babe. 
To this maternal shrine, in turns they come 
Each with her sacred lamp ; that, from the source 
Of living flame, which here immortal flows, 
Their portions of its lustre they may draw 
For days, for months, for years, for ages some, 
As their great Parent's discipline requires. 
Then to their several mansions they depart, 
In stars, in planets, through the unknown shores 
Of yon ethereal ocean. Who can tell, 
Even on the surface of this rolling earth, 
How many make abode % The fields, the groves, 
The winding rivers, and the azure main, 
Are render'd solemn by their frequent feet, 
Their rites sublime. There each her destined home 
Informs with that pure radiance from the skies 
Brought down, and shines throughout her little sphere 
Exulting. 1 

This universal Yenus, from the undecaying flame of whose 
altar has been derived whatever warms us with deligit, m 
the -myriads of myriads of objects that are lovely ^ nature, 



1 Pleasures of Imagination, book i. 



MORAL SENSE. 



195 



is indeed one of the most magnificent personifications of 
poetry. But philosophy has in truth been as fond of this 
personification as poetry itself, and is for ever seeking in 
objects that are beautiful the charm of this universal 
Beauty. It has been not less fond of personification in its 
ethical inquiries, and has for ever been employed in the 
search of one universal Virtue, — of something that is 
capable of existing, as it were, in various forms, and that 
may be supposed to form a part of all the actions which are 
denominated virtuous. There is no virtue, however, as I 
have already repeatedly said ; there are only virtuous 
actions ; or, to speak still more correctly, only virtuous 
agents : and it is not one virtuous agent only, or any 
number of virtuous agents, acting in one uniform manner, 
that excite our moral emotion of regard ; but agents acting 
in many different ways — in ways that are not less different 
in themselves, on account of the real or supposed simplicity 
of the generalizations and classifications which we may 
have made. 

By some, all virtue has been said to consist in benevolence; 
as if temperance, patience, fortitude, all the heroic exer- 
cises of self-command, in adversity and every species of 
suffering, were not regarded by us with mora] love, till we 
had previously discovered in the heroic sufferer some 
benevolent desire, which led him thus to endure without a 
single murmur, or rather, in all the circumstances of the 
case, with choice, an amount of physical evil, from which 
others would have shrunk with cowardly feebleness. By 
another sect of philosophers, the virtues of self-command 
have been exalted even above the gentler virtues of bene- 
volence. By others, the calm exercise of justice has been 
said to involve all moral excellence; and almost every 
ethical writer has had some favourite virtue, to which 
he has built his altar, and ascribed to it a sort of omni- 
presence in all the other virtues that are adored ; and 
that, but for the presence of this, as the inherent 



196 OF THE USE OF THE TERM MORAL SENSE. 



divinity, would have been objects of a worship that was 
idolatrous. 

From this very circumstance, indeed, of the different 
favourite virtues of different philosophers, some sophistical 
writers have endeavoured to draw conclusions subversive 
of the very distinctions of virtue and vice. They forget 
that even those who form their little exclusive systems, are 
still thus exclusive in their systems only; that in their 
hearts they feel the same regard for every virtue as if they 
had never entered into ethical controversy, and that the 
assertors of benevolence, as all which constitutes moral 
worth, did not, on that account, deny a moral difference of 
patience and impatience ; they only laboured to prove, 
though they might not be very successful in their demon- 
stration, that to be patient was but a form of being bene- 
volent, and was valued by us for nothing more than the 
benevolence which it implied. 

Of these too narrow systems it would be useless, how- 
ever, to enter into any examination at present. Their 
error will be best seen by considering the virtues which 
they would exclude. The classification of these virtues, 
that may be regarded as the most convenient, is that which 
considers them as duties, in their relation to different indi- 
viduals ; and, in the first place, as the most comprehensive 
of all classifications, — the arrangement of them as duties 
which relate primarily to others, and duties which relate 
directly to ourselves. 



ARRANGEMENT OF THE PRACTICAL VIRTUES. 1 97 * 



LECTURE XL 

DIVISION OF THE PRACTICAL VIRTUES INTO THREE CLASSES : DUTIES 
THAT RELATE PRIMARILY TO OTHERS — DUTIES THAT RELATE 
DIRECTLY TO OURSELVES — AND DUTIES TO GOD. 

After the discussions in which we have been of late 
engaged, of the theory of morals, we are now to enter on 
the consideration of those practical duties of which we have 
been investigating the source. Man is not formed to know 
only ; he is formed still more to avail himself of his know- 
ledge, by acting in conformity with it. In the society in 
which he is placed, he is surrounded with a multitude, to 
almost every one of whom some effort of his may be bene- 
ficial ; who, if they do not require the aid of his strenuous 
and long-continued exertions, which are necessary only 
on rare occasions, require, at least in the social intercourse 
of life, those little services of easy courtesy, which are not 
to be estimated as slight, from the seeming insignificance of 
each separate act ; since they contribute largely to the 
amount of general happiness by the universality of their 
diffusion, and the frequency of the repetition. While his 
actions may thus have almost unremitting usefulness, 
Nature has, with a corresponding provision, made it 
delightful to man to be active ; and, not content with 
making it delightful to him to be merely active, — since 
this propensity to action, which of itself might lead him 
sometimes to benefit others, might of itself also lead him to 
injure as well as to benefit, — she has, as we have seen, 
directed him how to act, by that voice of conscience which 
she has placed within his breast ; and given still greater 
efficacy to that voice by the pain which she has attached to 
disobedience, and the pleasure that is felt in obeying it, 
and remembering it as obeyed. Of this moral pleasure it 
is, indeed, the high character, that it is the only pleasure 



198 



OF THE ARRANGEMENT OF 



.which no situation can preclude; since it is beyond the 
reach of all those external aggressions and chances which 
can lessen only the power of diffusing happiness, not the 
wish of diffusing it; and which, even in robbing the vir- 
tuous of every thing beside, must still leave with them the > 
good which they have done, and the good which they would 
wish to do. 

Human life, then, when it is such, as not impartial spec- 
tators only, but the individual himself can survey with 
pleasure, is the exercise, and almost the unremitting exer- 
cise, of duties. To have discharged these best, is to have 
lived best. It is truly to have lived the most nobly, 
though there may have been no vanities of wealth in the 
simple home, which was great only because it contained a 
great inhabitant ; and no vanities of heraldry on the simple 
tomb, under the rude stone of which, or under the turf 
which is unmarked by any memorial, or by any ornament 
but the herbage and the flowers which nature every where 
sheds, the ashes of a great man repose. What mere 
symbols of honour, indeed, which man can confer, could 
add to the praise of him who possesses internally all which 
those symbols, even when they are not falsely representa- 
tive of a merit that does not exist, can only picture to the 
gazer's eye, to the praise of him who has done every thing 
which it was right for him to do ; who has abstained, in 
his very desires, from every thing which it would have 
required a sacrifice of virtue to possess ; and who, in suf- 
fering the common ills of our nature, has suffered them as 
common ills, not repining at affliction, nor proud of enduring 
it without a murmur, but feeling only that it is a part of a 
great system which is good, and that it is that which it is 
easy to bear ? 

Human life, then, when it is worthy of the name of life, 
is, ^as I have said, the exercise of duties. 

In treating of our practical virtues, I shall consider, first, 
those which directly relate to our fellow-creatures, and 



THE PRACTICAL VIRTUES. 



199 



afterwards those which immediately relate to ourselves. 
Besides these two classes of duties, indeed, there are others 
of a still higher kind — the duties which we owe to the 
great Being who formed us ; duties which, though they do 
not absolutely produce all the others, at least add to them 
a force of obligation, which more than doubles their own 
moral urgency ; and with the wilful violation or neglect of 
which, there can be as little moral excellence of character 
in the observance of other duties, as there would be in the 
virtue of any one who, after boasting of a thousand good 
deeds, should conclude by confessing, that he had never felt 
the slightest affection for the parent to whom he owed 
existence, and wisdom, and worldly honour, or for some 
generous benefactor who had been to him like a parent. 
These duties of gratitude and reverence which we owe to 
God, will admit, however, of more appropriate illustration, 
after the inquiries on which we are to enter in another part 
of the course, with respect to the traces of the divine per- 
fections, that are revealed to us in the frame and order of 
the universe. 

At present, then, the practical virtues which we have to 
consider, are those that relate immediately only to our fel- 
low-creatures and ourselves. 

Of these two great classes of duties, let us consider, 
in the first place, the duties that primarily relate to 
others. 

Of the living multitude in the midst of which we are 
placed on this earth, which is our common home, by far the 
greater number have no other relation to us than simply as 
they are human beings ; who may, indeed, sometimes come 
within the sphere of our usefulness, and who, even when 
they are far beyond this sphere of active aid, are still 
within the range of our benevolent affection, to which there 
are no limits even in distance the most remote, but to 
whom this benevolence of mere wishes is the only duty 
which, in such circumstances, is consigned to us. There 



200 



OF THE ARRANGEMENT OF 



are others, with whom we feel ourselves connected by 
peculiar ties, and to whom, therefore, we owe peculiar 
duties, varying in kind and importance with the nature 
of the circumstances that connect us with them. The 
general duties w T hich we owe to all mankind may be treated 
first, before we enter on the consideration of the peculiar 
duties which we owe to certain individuals only of this wide 
community. 

The general offices which we owe to every individual of 
mankind, may be reduced to two great generic duties — one 
negative, the other positive ; one leading us to abstain 
from all intentional injury of others, the other leading us to 
be actively beneficial to them. With the former of these, 
.at least with the greater number of the specific duties which 
it generically comprehends, justice is very nearly synony- 
mous ; with the other set of specific duties, benevolence ; 
which, though it may, in truth, be made to comprehend the 
negative duties also, since, to wish to benefit, is at the same 
time to wish not to injure, is usually confined to the desire 
of positive increase of good, without including mere 
abstinence from injury. 

I proceed, then, to the consideration of the former 
set of duties which are negative only, — as limited to 
abstinence from every thing which might be injurious 
to others. 

These duties, of course, are specifically as various as the 
different sorts of injury which it is in our power to occasion, 
directly or indirectly. Such injuries, if man were wicked 
enough, and fearless enough both of individual resentment 
and of the law, to do whatever it is in his power to do, 
would, in their possible complication and variety, be almost 
beyond our power of numbering them, and giving them 
names. The most important, however, if arranged accord- 
ing to the objects which it is the direct immediate intention 
of the injurer, at the moment of his injury, to assail, may 
be considered as reducible to the following general heads : 



THE PRACTICAL VIRTUES. 



201 



They are injuries which affect the sufferer directly in his 
person — in his property — in the affections of others — in his 
character — in his knowledge or belief — in liis virtue — in his 
tranquillity. They are injuries, I repeat, which are 
intended to affect the sufferer directly in his person — 
in his property — in the affections of others — in his charac- 
ter, &c. 

Let us now, then, proceed to the consideration of these 
subdivisions of our merely negative duty, in the order in 
which I have now stated them. Of injuries to the person 
of another, the most atrocious, I need not say, is that which 
deprives him of life ; and as it is the only evil which is 
absolutely irreparable by us, and is yet one to which many 
of our most impetuous passions might lead us, jealousy, 
envy, revenge, or even sudden wrath itself, without taking 
into account those instances of violence in which murder is 
only the dreadful mean of accomplishing a sordid end ; the 
Creator and Preserver of man has provided against the 
frequency of a crime to which there might seem so many 
fearful inducements and facilities, by rendering the contem- 
plation of it something from which even the most abandoned 
shrink with a loathing, that is, perhaps, the only human 
feeling which still remains in their heart ; and the commis- 
sion of it a source of a wilder agony of horror than can be 
borne, even by the gloomy heart which was capable of con- 
ceiving the crime. " Homo homini res sacra." When we 
read or hear of the assassin, who is driven by the anguish 
of his own conscience to reveal to those whom most he 
dreaded, the secret which he was most anxious to hide ; 
addressing himself to the guardians, not of the mere laws, 
which he has offended, (for of the laws of man he does not 
think, except that he may submit himself to that death 
which they only can award,) but to the guardians of the 
life and happiness of those whose interests have been 
assigned to them, the guardians of the individual whom 
their protection at that moment, which is ever before his 

K 2 



202 



OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES RELATING 



memory, was too powerless to save ; when we think of the 
number of years that in many instances of this kind have 
elapsed since the mortal blow was given, and of the inefii- 
cacy of time, which effaces all other sorrows, to lessen that 
remorse which no one suspected to be the cause of the 
wasting of the cheek, and the gloomy melancholy of the 
eye, can we fail to regard a spectacle like this, as an awful 
testimony to the goodness of that Almighty Protector of 
the world, who proportions the internal restraints of con- 
science to the iniquity that needs to be restrained, and to 
the amount of evil which would flow from it, if unrestrained, 
and who, seeming to leave the life of every individual at 
the mercy of every arm, has secured for it a defence in the 
very bosom of him whose watchful glance had already 
marked its victim, and whose hand was already almost 
raised to give the blow ? The reign of superstition, its 
wide and general reign, is now over, at least in our land. 
We do not need to have recourse to volumes of philosophy 
to convince us that the ghost which haunts the murderer, 
is but an image of his own fancy. This, now, the very 
children will tell us, while they laugh not m gaily, perhaps, 
as at other tales, but still with a laughter which, though 
mixed with some little horror, is sincere, at the spectres 
which their predecessors in the same nursery, a single 
generation back, would, on hearing the same story, have 
seen before their eyes for more than half the night. There 
is no fear then now that we should be tempted to suppose 
any peculiar supernatural visitation, in the shape that 
vseems for ever rising to the eye of the murderer. It is to 
the influence of his strong conception alone that all will 
agree in ascribing it ; and if it be, as it most certainly is, 
the result only of conception that is awfully vivid, how 
strongly does it mark the horror, so far surpassing the 
horror of every other offence which must have given to the 
imagination this agonizing sensibility. The robber may 
plunder, the traitor may betray, without any moral super- 



TO THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS. 203 

stition of this sort ; but let one human being give his last 
gasp beneath the dagger of another human being, and 
though superstition had before been banished from the 
earth, there is at least one individual to whom this single 
crime would be sufficient to call it back. 

The species of injury which I have placed next in order, 
is that which relates to the property of others. 

Were we to consider for the first time the unequal distri- 
bution of property in society, without reflecting on the 
amount of general happiness to which that unequal distri- 
bution is subservient, we should scarcely know r , in our 
astonishment at the seeming rapacity of the few and the 
acquiescence of the many, whether the boldness of such an 
usurpation, at least of that which on such a first unreflect- 
ing view would seem usurpation, or the strange submission 
by all the plundered, to an usurpation which they might 
have prevented, were the more wonderful. It would not 
be easy to represent this first aspect of society in a more 
lively manner than has been done by Paley. 

" If you should see a flock of pigeons in a field of corn ; 
and if (instead of each picking where and what it liked, 
taking just as much as it wanted, and no more,) you should 
see ninety-nine of them gathering all they got into a heap ; 
reserving nothing for themselves but the chaff and the 
refuse ; keeping this heap for one, and that the weakest, 
perhaps worst pigeon of the flock ; sitting round and look- 
ing on all the winter, whilst this one was devouring, throw- 
ing about, and wasting it ; and if a pigeon, more hardy or 
hungry than the rest, touched a grain of the hoard, all the 
others instantly flying upon it, and tearing it to pieces : if 
you should see this, you would see nothing more than what 
is every day practised and established among men. Among 
men, you see the ninety-and-nine toiling and scraping 
together a heap of superfluities for one, (and this one, too, 
oftentimes the feeblest and worst of the whole set, a child, 
a woman, a madman, or a fool ;) getting nothing for them- 



204 



OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES RELATING 



selves all the while, but a little of the coarsest of the provi- 
sion, which their own industry produces ; looking quietly 
on, while they see the fruits of all their labour spent or 
spoiled ; and if one of the number take or touch a particle 
of the hoard, the others joining against him, and hanging 
him for the theft." 1 

There must, indeed, as this author adds, be " some very 
important advantages to account for an institution which, 
in this view of it, is so paradoxical and unnatural," and 
such advantages it is very easy to discover. The gross 
inequality of property, strange as it may seem to be at any 
one moment, is, it is evident, only the effect of that security 
and absolute command of property, which allow the con- 
tinual accumulation of it by continued industry ; and with- 
out such security, and absolute command of the profits of 
exertion, the arm of the strong would soon have been weary 
with the little toil which was necessary for mere subsis- 
tence ; and the ingenuity of the wise would have contented 
itself with enjoying, rather than augmenting, its scanty but 
precarious acquisitions. If all things had been common to 
all, that common all would truly have been of little worth 
to the individuals, who would have seen nothing appro- 
priated, indeed, but nothing enjoyed. Instead of that 
beautiful and populous earth which we behold, — where 
cities pour wealth on the fields, and the fields, in their turn, 
send plenty to the cities, — where all are conferring aid and 
receiving aid, and the most sensual and selfish cannot con- 
sume a single* luxury, without giving, however unintention- 
ally, some comfort, or the means of comfort, to others, — 
instead of this noble dwelling-place of so many noble in- 
habitants, we should have had a waste or a wilderness, and 
a few miserable stragglers, half famished on that wide soil 
which now gives abundance to millions. Nor would the 
loss of mere external convenience and splendour have been 
the chief evil. The intellectual sciences, and arts, and 
1 Paley's Moral Philosophy, 21st edition, 8vo, vol. i. p. 106. 



TO THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS, 



205 



systems of moral polity, which distinguish the civilized from 
the savage, by differences far more important than any 
which the eye can perceive, never would have arisen on 
such a scene. It was property, that very exclusive pro- 
perty, which is now better secured by the civilization to 
which it gave rise, that was itself, at a still earlier period, 
the great civilizer of man. 

If, indeed, in considering these comforts of society, which 
flow from the distribution of property, that could not be 
secure without becoming soon unequal, we considered only 
the comfort of the few who possess the greater share, the 
happiness of the few might seem, and, it will be allowed, 
would truly be, comparatively, an object of too little value, 
to be set against any great loss of comfort on the part of 
the multitude. But it requires only a very slight reflection 
on the circumstances of society, as it is at present before 
us, to discover, that, even if the few have gained more, the 
many have gained much ; and perhaps to a very nice 
observer and estimator of the situation of both, — of the en- 
joyment that is involved in mere occupation, and of the 
misery that is involved in the total want of it, — it might 
seem necessary to reverse the scale, and to ascribe the 
greater gain to the many rather than to the few. They 
profit by the results of every science and art, which they 
enable the studious, whom they support, to prosecute at 
their leisure ; the speculations of the sage, whom they 
perhaps count idle,— speculations that teach new processes, 
mechanical or chemical, to the innumerable busy hands 
that are every moment producing, almost blindly, the 
beautiful results, of which they know little more than that 
they are of their own producing, — may be found at last 
embodied, as it were, in some humble implement or humble 
luxury, in the obscurest cottage ; and even the wretch who, 
in the common prison, earns a part of his subsistence hy 
the meanest operations to which, in the division of manu- 
facturing labour, the human hand can be put, has accom- 



206 



OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES RELATING 



modations which, miserable as they are, compared with the 
luxuries of the rich and the free, are yet themselves 
luxuries, compared with the far more miserable accommo- 
dations whicb, if there never had been any inequality of 
property among mankind, would, in that system of sloth, 
and consequent imbecility, have been the common lot of all. 
This influence of wealth, and of the division of labour, in 
the enjoyments of the lowest of the people, is very strongly 
pictured by Dr. Mandeville, in one of the most striking 
passages of his work. 

" A man would be laughed at, that should discover luxury 
in the plain dress of a poor creature that walks along in a 
thick parish gown and a coarse shirt underneath it ; and 
yet what a number of people, how many different trades, 
and what a variety of skill and tools, must be employed to 
have the most ordinary Yorkshire cloth. What depth of 
thought and ingenuity, what toil and labour, and what 
length of time must it have cost, before a man could learn 
from a seed to raise and prepare so useful a product as 
linen ! Must that society not be vainly curious, among 
whom this admirable commodity, after it is made, shall not 
be thought fit to be used, even by the poorest of all, before 
it is brought to a perfect whiteness : which is not to be 
procured but by the assistance of all the elements, joined 
to a world of industry and patience ? I have not done yet : 
Can we reflect, not only on the cost laid out upon this 
luxurious invention, but likewise on the little time the 
whiteness of it continues, in which part of its beauty con- 
sists ; that every six or seven days at farthest it wants 
cleaning, and while it lasts, is a continual charge to the 
wearer ; can we, I say, reflect on all this, and not think it 
an extravagant piece of nicety, that even those who receive 
alms of the parish, should not only have whole garments 
made of this operose manufacture, but likewise that, as 
soon as they are soiled, to restore them to their pristine 
purity, they should make use of one of the most judicious 



4 



TO THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS. 207 

as well as difficult compositions that chemistry can boast 
of; with which, dissolved in water by the help of 
fire, the most detersive and yet innocent lixivium is pre- 
pared, that human industry has hitherto been able to 
invent/' 1 

The feeling of a breach of duty in the violation of the 
property of another, though uniformly attendant on the 
notion of property, requires, of course, this notion as ante- 
cedent to the moral feeling ; and property is, in a great 
measure, the creature of public law, not because our moral 
feelings are arbitrary results of the arbitrary institutions of 
mau, but because, as soon as we are acquainted with the 
nature of social ordinances, and the advantages to which 
they give rise, these ordinances become themselves an 
object of that moral regard, the susceptibility of which, as 
an essential principle of the mind, preceded all law, and 
transfer this regard which themselves excite to forms of 
succession and transfer, which might otherwise have been 
arbitrary and indifferent. It is not in such cases, however, 
the social ordinance which is loved merely as an ordinance, 
but the good to which it is perceived that such ordinances, 
upon the whole, tend to give rise ; and this obedience to 
that which is an evident source of good upon the whole, 
and which, in the particular case of property, is obviously 
productive of the greatest good, as a standard to which, in 
cases of doubtful right, all might be obliged to bend, ana 
peace be thus preserved, when otherwise there could not 
fail to be hostility, is the circumstance that has extended 
to artificial arrangements of property, those moral emotions 
which originally had a narrower field, but which still have 
the same great object as before, when they embrace the 
widest plans of legislative wisdom. 

The writers who attempt to prove justice to be a virtue 
wholly adventitious, and not the result of any original 



1 Fable of the Bees, vol. i. p. 182. London. 1728. 



208 OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES RELATING 



moral tendency of our nature, because in different stages or 
circumstances of society there are different views of property, 
forget that justice, as a moral virtue, is not the creation of 
property, but the conformity of our actions to those views ; 
that though all men in every part of the earth, and in every 
age since the earth was peopled, had, without even the 
exception of a single monstrous individual, united in their 
notions of what is termed property, there might still have 
been the most complete injustice, — a desire of invading this 
property, not merely as frequent as in the present circum- 
stances of mankind, but equally universal with the notion 
of property itself. There might then, the mere notion of 
property remaining in every respect precisely the same, 
have been either perfect justice or perfect injustice, or such 
a mixture of both as the present order of society presents. 
It is justice not to invade that which is recognised as be- 
longing to another ; and though law cannot produce justice, 
it may present to it new objects, by the standard which it 
fixes of transfers and successions, that otherwise might 
have been arbitrary; and may present these new objects 
to our justice, without any breach of moral principle ; since, 
though law, as mere law, or the expression of the will of 
many individuals, can never be felt by us to be morally 
obligatory on this account alone, obedience to a system of 
laws, of which the evident tendency is to the public good, 
is itself an object of our moral regard, as soon as we are 
capable of knowing what law is, and what are its general 
beneficial tendencies. In the different rights of property, 
then, in different nations and ages, as variously sanctioned 
in various systems of jurisprudence, I perceive no incon- 
sistency of the moral principle. I perceive every where, 
on the contrary, a moral principle which, among the rude 
and the civilized, and in all the innumerable gradations of 
civilized life, and of systems of law more or less sage and 
refined, feels that there are certain things which it would 
be wrong to invade ; in savage life, perhaps only the objects 



TO THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS. 



209 



which are in the immediate occupation of another, or on 
which he has exercised his labour for purposes of utility to 
himself; in more civilized society, innumerable objects 
which the circumstances of that society have rendered 
essential to the comfort of their possessor, and which law, 
with a view to the preservation and furtherance of general 
happiness, has allotted in various ways. Till it can be 
shown, therefore, that this regard for social ordinances that 
are manifestly, upon the whole, productive of good, and 
consequently the regard for that good of which they are 
productive, are inconsistent with the moral principle, of 
which the great object is that very good ; the sophist, who 
would represent the varying rights of property as proofs of 
a varying morality, has no argument in showing the mere 
influence of such ordinances, that teach us to respect what 
otherwise might have been indifferent. It is the same 
moral principle of justice still, though directed to new 
objects ; as it is still the same power of vision that traces 
the stars of the firmament, though, but for the nice contri- 
vances of the optician, and the labour of all the ruder arti- 
ficers who have furnished him with the materials of his 
beautiful art, eye after eye might for ages have gazed upon 
the great vault above, without knowing the very existence 
of brilliant multitudes of worlds, which, with the aid of 
this skilful but simple contrivance, it is now impossible for 
the rudest observer not to perceive. Who is there that, on 
this account, will deny to the mind its original visual sen- 
sibility ? That mental sensibility is the same, the bodily 
organ of sight is the same ; yet how different in power and 
extent is our vision itself ! at least as different as the wider 
and narrower influence of justice that respects in one state 
of society a thousand objects which are unknown to it in a 
state of ruder polity. 

In contending for essential principles of morals, no one 
asserts that, in circumstances which are absolutely different, 
the moral sentiment should be the same ; more than that an 



210 OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES RELATING 



eye, with and without a telescope, should form the same 
views of the nature that is before it. In savage life, the 
notions of property are few, because there are, in truth, in 
such a state, few objects that can be useful to the individual. 
It is luxury, which, creating new objects and new wants, 
creates also new objects to be appropriated. It is probable, 
if we are to suppose man ever to have been absolutely 
savage, without the exercise of a single art, that mere occu- 
pancy was then the only title. Indeed, what other title to 
the common gifts of nature could there in such circum- 
stances be ? When his labour, however, had been employed 
in rendering useful what in itself had no use, he would not 
merely feel the work of his art to be his own ; but the work 
would be respected as his by those who knew the labour 
which he had employed, and the purposes of personal ad- 
vantage to which it was meant to be instrumental ; or at 
least, if in such circumstances of temptation it were an 
object of rapine to others, there would still, unless in cir- 
cumstances of mutual enmity, be a feeling of conscious 
wrong in the aggressor. This species of property we accord- 
ingly find recognised wherever man is to be found ; and is 
it wonderful that other species of property, which could not 
even be conceived in savage life, however useful in the 
circumstances of refined society, should not be regarded as 
sacred by those to whom the possession of it would seem to 
confer no utility on the possessor ; who would rather have 
the trouble of excluding others, than the pleasure of enjoy- 
ing that from which he excluded them ? 

The mere history of property, then, interesting as it is in 
the illustrations which it affords of many beautiful pheno- 
mena of our moral nature, and of the advantages which 
man receives from the social government, to the force of 
which his own individual power has contributed as an 
element, like the other elements that mingle with it, is yet 
valuable only as illustrative. The moral principle which, 
in the various stages of society, in all the varieties of pro- 



TO THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS. 



211 



perty which social ordinances have made or secured, im- 
presses on us the duty of respecting the various objects 
which are property, that is to say, which are objects that, 
in these particular circumstances of society, could not be 
violated without a feeling of self-reproach in the invader, 
is all which, ethically, we have to consider. That such a 
feeling does arise in the breast of him who invades what, 
in the general circumstances of the society, is regarded as 
property, even the sophist, who would found so much on 
the varying circumstances in which it arises, does not dis- 
pute ; and it is this feeling, in whatever circumstances, and 
in whatever manner it may have arisen, from which the 
duty flows. "Whether the object be of a kind which, even 
in the fabled state of nature, we should have felt it right to 
respect, as the property of him who had won and occupied 
it with his own unwearied labour, or of a kind which we 
respect as property, because we respect that social good 
which arises from the laws that have declared it to be pro- 
perty, it is not wonderful that our feeling of respect for it 
should seem, in these two cases, to be the same ; since the 
respect is only that feeling of moral duty, the object of 
which, that is always some form of good to others, is in 
both cases truly the same. 

Justice, then, I repeat, (and the distinction is one which 
is of great importance,) is not what constitutes property ; 
it is that virtue which presupposes property, and respects 
it, however constituted. It may vary, therefore, with all 
the ordinances of different social states, but it is still the 
same virtue, if it respect what, in those different states, is 
legally assigned to individuals ; and, as the same virtue, 
in all these cases, directed to the same object of abstaining 
from what is previously affirmed or recognised as property, 
it does not vary in the variations of human policy, that 
may assign to individuals in one state, what, from different 
views of general good, would not be assigned to them in a 
different state ; but which still, in every case, points out to 



212 OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES RELATING 



justice what is to be understood as the property which that 
unvarying virtue does not fail to respect. 

To point out to you the advantages which flow from the 
general observance of this duty, that leads us to abstain 
from the property of others, however much it might seem 
capable of contributing to our own gratification, would 
surely be a superfluous labour. Indeed, in picturing to you 
the advantages which flow from the very inequality of pro- 
perty itself, I have already sufficiently exhibited to you the 
benefit of the principle which respects property, and of the 
duty which consists in our conformity to this principle ; a 
duty without which, indeed, the mere acknowledgment of 
the various things possessed, as things of which the posses- 
sion ought not to be violated, would be of no avail. The 
general feelings of mankind, with respect to the importance 
of this duty, are indeed sufficiently shown in the laws 
which they have established for punishing the breach of it. 
Even under our own excellent legal system, in which death 
is appointed to him who premeditates and executes the 
death of another, it is appointed also to him who has 
assailed the property only, not the person ; and politically 
and morally erroneous as this equal allotment of punish- 
ment to offences so unequal most truly is. it still marks 
sufficiently the general feeling of the evil which would 
arise to society from the frequent violation of this simple 
duty, that such an allotment of punishment should still 
continue in such a nation, and in such an age. 

When we consider the multitude who are in possession 
of means of enjoyment, that are to them the means only of 
selfish avarice or of profligate waste, — in both cases, 
perhaps, productive rather of evil than of good to the 
individual possessor, — and when, at the same time, we 
consider the multitudes, far more numerous, to whom a 
small share of that cumbrous and seemingly unprofitable 
wealth would, in an instant, diffuse a comfort that would 
make the heart of the indigent gay in his miserable hovel, 



TO THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS. 213 

and be like a beam of health itself to that pale cheek which 
is slowly wasting on its wretched bed of straw, in cold and 
darkness, and a famine that is scarcely felt, only because 
appetite itself is quenched by disease ; it might almost 
seem to the inconsiderate, at least for a moment, in con- 
templating such a scene, that no expression of the social 
voice could be so beneficial as that which, should merely 
say, Let there be no restraint of property, but let all the 
means of provision for the wants of mankind be distributed 
according to the more or less imperious necessity of those 
wants which all partake. It requires only the considera- 
tion of a moment, however, to perceive that this very 
distribution would itself be the most injurious boon that 
could be offered to indigence ; that soon, under such a 
system of supposed freedom from the usurpations of the 
wealthy, instead of the wealth which supports and the 
industry which is supported, the bounty which relieves 
and the penury that is relieved, there would only be one 
general penury, without the possibility of relief; and an 
industry that would be exercised, not in plunderiog the 
wealthy, for there could not then be wealth to admit of 
plunder, but in snatching from the weaker some scanty 
morsel of a wretched aliment that would scarcely be suffi- 
cient to repay the labour of the struggle to him who was 
too powerful not to prevail. The vices that would tyran- 
nize uncontrolled in such an iron age I do not attempt to 
picture. I speak only of the mere physical wants of man, 
and of the means which different states of society afford for 
the gratification of those wants according as possession is 
more or less secured, though no other original difference 
were supposed, than of the simple right of property. There 
would be no palaces, indeed, in such a system of equal 
rapine ; and this might be considered as but a slight evil, 
from the small number of those who were stripped of them ; 
biit when the chambers of state had disappeared, where 
would be the cottage, or rather the whole hamlet of cot- 



214 



OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES 



tages that might be expected to occupy its place ? The 
simple dwellings of a happy peasantry might be the last, 
indeed, to be invaded ; but when the magnificent mansion 
had been stripped by the first band of plunderers, these, 
too, would soon find plunderers as rapacious. X o elegant 
art could be exercised, no science cultivated, where the 
search of a precarious subsistence for the day would afford 
us no leisure for studies or exercises beyond the supply of 
mere animal wants ; and man, who, with property, is what 
we now behold him, and is to be, in his glorious progress 
even on earth, a being far nobler than we are capable, in 
our present circumstances, of divining, would, without pro- 
perty, soon become, in the lowest depth of brutal ignorance 
and wretchedness, what it is almost as difficult for our 
imagination to picture to us, as it would be for it to picture 
what he may become on earth, after the many long ages of 
progressive improvement. Such is the state to which we 
should be reduced, if all men were to do what the robber 
individually does. He contributes whatever a single heart 
and a single arm can contribute, to make of the social and 
happy world around us, that unsocial and miserable world 
which we vainly labour to conceive. His crime is not per- 
petrated against an individual only, but against the very 
union that binds society together : and the abhorrence with 
which his crime is considered, is not the mere wrath that 
is felt by the aggrieved individual, it is the sympathizing 
resentment of all mankind. 



OF THE NEGATIVE DUTIES. 



215 



LECTURE XII. 

OF OUR NEGATIVE DUTIES TO OTHERS *. ABSTAINING FROM ROBBING 
THEM OF THE AFFECTIONS OF OTHERS — OF ABSTAINING FROM 
INJURING THE CHARACTER OF OTHERS — OF VERACITY. 

In treating of the general duties which we owe to all 
mankind, I considered these, in my last Lecture, as of two 
classes, negative and positive ; the one set leading us to 
abstain from injuring others, the other set leading us to be 
actively useful to them. 

An individual, it is evident, may be injured by us in 
various ways, with which, of course, in the obligation to 
abstain from the different forms of injury, there is a co- 
extensive variety of duty. He may be injured directly in 
his person, in his property, in those affections of others 
which are almost a species of property, — in his character, 
in his knowledge or belief, in his virtue, in his tranquillity. 

Of these various modes of injury we have considered two. 
I proceed then, now, to the third in order, the injury which 
we may do to any one, by robbing him of the affections of 
those whose love may, perhaps, be to him the most precious 
of his possessions. 

Affection, I have said, may be considered almost as a 
form of wealth possessed ; and the most delightful affection 
which can be given to us, is truly, if I may apply the cold 
terms of merchandise to the pure commerce of the heart, a 
species of property for which the price of similar affection 
has been paid, and to which the laws of wedlock have 
given a legal and holy title. It is to the robbery of con- 
jugal affection, therefore, as the most important, that I shall 
confine the few remarks which I have to offer on this species 
of injury. 

If the guilt of the robber were to be estimated in propor- 
tion to the quantity of evil which he knowingly produces, 



216 OF ABSTAINING FROM ROBBING INDIVIDUALS 



where is it that our most indignant hatred of the crime 
should be fixed ? Not surely on him whom alone we are 
accustomed to denominate a robber. The wretch who 
perishes on the scaffold for his sordid thefts, unpitied, 
perhaps, by a single individual in the whole crowd of gazers, 
that mark the last faint convulsion of his limbs, only to 
wonder when the quiverings are to cease, may deserve the 
horrors of that ignominious punishment under which he 
sinks. But does he truly rank in villany with the robber 
of another class, — with him who would be astonished, 
perhaps, to have a place assigned to him among common 
pilferers, but who is in guilt the basest of them all, however 
noble he may be in titles, and splendid with all that pomp 
which can be alike the covering of vice and of virtue ? 
There may pass in some stately carriage, while the crowd 
are still gazing on the body that hangs lifeless before them, 
some criminal of far deeper iniquity, whose eye too may 
turn where all other eyes are fixed, and who may wonder 
at the increase of crimes, and moralize on their causes, and 
rejoice at their punishment, while the carriage, in which he 
reclines and moralizes at his ease, is bearing him to the 
house of his friend, by a secret appointment with her who 
is the mistress of it ; whom months of incessant falsehoods 
and treacheries were unable to subdue, but whom, by the 
influence of some finer simulation, he is at last to carry off, 
as a noble booty, from the virtue and happiness to which 
she never is to return. 

The common thief, who steals or forces his way into the 
house at midnight, has never been treated with kindness 
and confidence by him whose property he invades ; and all 
which he carries off may usually be repaired without very 
much difficulty, or may perhaps be of a kind which is 
scarcely of sufficient importance to our convenience to be 
replaced by the easy efforts that might replace it. But 
what is to repair the plunder of him whose robbery is of 
that which exists only within the heart ; who steals not the 



OF THE AFFECTIONS OF OTHERS. 



217 



object of regard only, but the very capacity of feeling affec- 
tion and confidence again, and who, by a single crime, 
converts, in the eyes of the sufferer, that world of social 
harmony, which God has made so beautiful, into a world 
of deceivers and the deceived; of pleasures that are but 
illusion, and of misery that is reality ? 

Let us imagine one of those domestic groups, which form, 
to the lover of happiness, one of the loveliest spectacles 
with which the earth is embellished — a family, in the small 
circle of which there is no need of distracting and noisy 
gaieties without, because there are constant tranquillity and 
enjoyment within ; in which the pleasure of loving is, in 
the bosom of the wedded pair, a delight that, as blending in 
one uniform emotion with the pleasure, of being loved, is 
scarcely to be distinguished from that affection which is 
ever flowing around it, — a delight that grows not weaker 
but more intense by diffusion to the little frolickers around, 
who as yet know little more than the affection which they 
feel, and the affection of which they are the objects, but 
who are rising into virtue amid the happiness which 
virtue sheds. In considering such a scene, would it require 
any very long and subtile effort of reflection to determine 
what would be the greatest injury which human malice 
could devise against it, if it were in the power of malice to 
execute every atrocity which it might conceive ? It would 
be that very injury which the adulterer perpetrates, — the 
crime of him who can see all this happiness, and can say in 
his heart, this happiness shall exist no longer. A time may 
indeed come, when, if his artifices be successful, this happi- 
ness will exist no more ; when she, who was once as 
innocent as she was happy, shall have been consigned to 
that remorse which is to hurry her, too slowly for her own 
wishes, to the grave ; and when the home which she has 
deserted shall be a place of wretchedness and desolation ; 
where there is one miserable being who knows his misery, 
and others who still smile, while they inquire anxiously, 

L 



218 OF ABSTAINING FROM ROBBING INDIVIDUALS 



with a sort of fearful wonder, for the presence of her whose 
caresses they no longer enjoy, and are as yet ignorant that 
a time is to arrive when they are to blush at the very name 
of her to whose knee and embrace of fondness they are 
longing to return. 

When Milton describes the leader of the fallen spirits as 
witnessing, on his entrance into paradise, the happiness of 
the first pair, he knew well how necessary it was to the 
poetic interest which he wished us to feel in the character 
and enterprise even of this audacious rebel, that, in the very 
prospect of executing his infernal purpose, he should have 
some reluctance to disturb that beautiful happiness which 
was before his eyes. 

hell ! what do mine eyes with grief behold ! 

Into our room of bliss thus high advanced 

Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps, 

Not spirits, yet to heavenly spirits bright 

Little inferior ; whom my thoughts pursue 

With wonder, and could love, so lively shines 

In them divine resemblance, and such grace 

The hand that form'd them on their shape hath pour'd. 

Ah, gentle pair ! ye little think how nigh 

Your change approaches, when all these delights 

Will vanish and deliver ye to wo, 

More wo, the more your taste is now of joy. 

Ill-fenced your heaven to keep out such a foe 

As now is enter'd; yet no purposed foe 

To you, whom I could pity thus forlorn, 

Though I unpitied: league with you I seek, 

And mutual amity. — Hell shall unfold, 

To entertain you two, her widest gates, 

And send forth all her kings ; there will be room. 

Not like these narrow limits, to receive 

Your numerous offspring; if no better place, 

Thank him who puts me, loath, to this revenge 

Oa you who wrong me not, for him who wrong'd. 

And should I at your harmless innocence 

Melt, as I do, yet public reason just, 

Honour and empire with revenge enlarged, 



OF THE AFFECTIOXS OF OTHERS. 



219 



By conqirring this new world, compels me now 
To do what else, though danm'd, I should abhor. 1 

It is similar happiness which the adulterer invades. But 
he has not the compunction of the fiend in invading it. He 
enters into paradise, eager to destroy. He invades it 
because it is happiness. In many cases it is his vanity which 
he seeks to gratify, far more than his sensual appetite. 
The beauty with which the eye is most attractive to him, is 
the love with which it is already beaming on another ; and 
if there were less previous conjugal affection to be over- 
come, and therefore less wretchedness to be produced, by 
the conquest which he is ambitious of achieving, he would 
often forbear his seductions, and reserve them for those who 
may afford to his insatiable wishes of moral desolation a 
greater harvest of misery. 

Such is the adulterer ; and of all this mass of wretched- 
ness which he produces, and of all the iniquity which can 
calmly meditate and plan such wretchedness, what is the 
palliation which he assigns ? It is the violence of his love 
alone which he pleads. He is not aware w^hat aggravation 
there is of his guilt, in that which he regards, or professes 
to regard, as the apology of it. If by love he mean mere 
sexual appetite, his excuse is of the same kind as that of 
the common robber, who should think that he had given a 
moral justification of his rapacity by describing the 
debaucheries which it enabled him to pursue, and the 
difficulty which, without his thefts, he should feel in visiting 
as frequently the tavern and the brothel. And if by the 
love which is asserted, he meant an affection more worthy 
of the name, what are w r e to think of the sincerity of his 
love, who, to gratify his own lust, is eager to plunge into 
guilt and wretchedness the very being whom he professes 
to regard with an interest which should have led him, if 
sincere, to expose himself to every thing but guilt, to save 



Paradise Lost, book iv. 358 — 392. 



220 OF ABSTAINING FROM ROBBING INDIVIDUALS 



her from misery like that which he is intentionally pre- 
paring for her ? To speak of affection, therefore, or of 
feelings to which he dares to give the name of affection, is 
on his part to double his crime. It is to confess, that while 
he is not merely regardless of the happiness of the husband 
whom he robs, but equally regardless of the happiness of 
her of whom he robs him, he is as completely and brutally 
selfish in his love, as he could be in his indifference or his 
hatred ; and that the peace, and honour, and virtue of the 
being whom he professes to regard as the dearest to him in 
existence, are therefore a3 nothing, when he must either 
sacrifice them, or make a sacrifice, which is far more pain- 
ful to him, of one of his own desires. 

In the present state of manners, in which, at least among 
the higher orders of society, there is so very little of what 
was once considered as domestic life, and, in the place of its 
simple unpretending enjoyments, such constant and close 
succession of almost theatrical exhibitions, on stages on 
which each is to each mutually spectacle and spectator, to 
perform gracefully their part is as much an object of 
ambition to the unpaid actors and actresses, in this voluntary 
and unremitting drama, as it is to the actors and actresses 
on another stage, whose livelihood, as well as glory, depends 
on the number of hands which they can render by their 
best efforts most noisy in applause. That there is a very 
powerful charm in elegant manners, and in the lighter 
eloquence of conversation, which can adapt itself readily to 
every subject, from the statesmanship of the day to the 
flower or the feather, I am far from denying ; and that, 
even in a moral view, from the influence which it gives to 
the opinions of the individual, and the easy happiness which 
it spreads to all around him, this excellence, frivolous as it 
may seem, is not to be despised, however humble and 
comparatively insignificant it must always be rated, when 
placed in the scale of merit with nobler wisdom, or still 
nobler excellence of the heart. One great evil of this 



OF THE AFFECTIONS OF OTHERS. 



221 



system of universal display, however, and of the familiar 
and sprightly levities which it involves, is, that where 
this gay excellence is of high value, the praise of it must be 
sought from all. To all alike must be paid those gallantries 
of manners which all alike are to admire. The wedded 
and the unwedded may thus be said to live in a constant 
interchange of symbols of affection, which, though under- 
stood to be mere symbols, may yet, as symbols, excite that 
very affection which they were never seriously intended to 
awake. Nor is this all. In the eagerness for general 
admiration, there may be a wish to excite feelings that, 
without amounting to love, may approach love, in the heart 
that is already the property of another ; an assiduity of 
attention which, though there may be no thought of leading 
the way to absolute infidelity, has a great portion of the 
guilt of adultery itself, and may almost be considered as a 
minor species of it ; since its object is to excite a peculiar 
admiration, which cannot be felt without some estrange- 
ment, or tendency to estrangement, of conjugal regard. In 
this way, indeed, I have no doubt that more disquietude of 
domestic happiness has been produced upon the whole, 
than by adultery itself, and produced in bosoms that would 
have shrunk indignantly from the solicitations of the 
adulterer. 

The next species of general duty, to which we have to 
proceed, is that which relates to the character of others. 

The extent of the injury which we may occasion to any one, 
by wounding his reputation, is not to be estimated merely by 
the advantages which a pure and honourable character directly 
affords. It is necessary to take into account also the value, 
above even its high intrinsic excellence, which every in- 
dividual, from the very constitution of our common nature, 
is led to attach to it. The conscience of the virtuous is, 
indeed, in one sense of the word, sufficient to itself. It 
cannot be unhappy, while afflictions are all from without, and 



222 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



there is no self-reproach within to lay open the bosom to 
their cruel power ; yet, even to the virtuous, the approving 
voice of those who are moving along with them in their 
earthly path, is one of the most pleasing accessions which 
their happiness can receive ; and to rob them of this voice, 
or to convert it into murmurs or whispers of reprehension, 
is to do all the evil which malice, that cannot rob them of 
the consciousness of merit itself, is able to effect. The 
consciousness itself, indeed, is happily not within the 
power of the calumniator. But if it were within his power, 
who can doubt that that power would be gladly exercised ; 
that he who defames, at the risk of detection, would, if the 
virtues of others were submitted to his will, prevent all 
peril of this kind, by tearing from the heart every virtue, 
of which he must now be content with denying the exis- 
tence, and thus at once consign his victim to ignominy, and 
rob him of its only consolation ? So hateful, indeed, to the 
wicked, is the very thought of moral excellence, that, if 
even one of the many slanderers with whom society is filled, 
had this tremendous power, there might not be a single 
virtue remaining on the earth. 

The evil, however, which calumny can do to those whose 
virtue is scarcely in need of any support from public 
approbation, is slight, when compared with the evil which 
it may produce to those whose weaker virtue is mixed with 
much imperfection, that affords an easy pretext for censure, 
even when censure is unmerited ; while the loss of the 
encouraging regard of others is more injurious, when with- 
held from frailty, that, even when it wishes to do what is 
worthy of praise, is too ready to fall, without the support 
to which it clings. The real imperfections of mankind are, 
therefore, delightful to the heart of the slanderer, who sees 
in them only a warrant for all those additional charges of 
guilt or error which it may be his interest to add to the 
real amount. They are the elements of the poison which he 



THE CHARACTER OF OTHERS. 



223 



prepares, without which he would have as little power to 
cloud the moral scene, as the enchantresses of ancient fable 
would have had to obscure the sun, or bring down the moon 
from the sky, without the baleful herbs that were essential 
to the incantation. 

It is our duty, I will not say only to love the good, but 
even with our indignation against the wicked to mix some 
portion of pity, that pity which would lead us always to 
wish, that even their names could still be added to the list 
of the virtuous. If such be our duty then, what are we to 
think of those who, far from pitying the wicked, would 
gladly double all their atrocities, and who, still farther from 
loving the good, would point them out, as the wicked, to 
public execration ? There is one species of atrocity, indeed, 
which such malignant industry does not fail to render clear ; 
but it would be well for him who exhibits it if that guilt 
were the guilt of others. 

" He of whom ye delight to speak evil," says a senten- 
tious French moralist, " may become acquainted with what 
you have said, and he will be your enemy ; he may remain 
in ignorance of it, and, even though what you have said 
were true, you would still have to reproach yourself with 
the meanness of attacking one who had no opportunity of 
defending himself. If scandal is to be secret, it is the crime 
of a coward ; if it is to become known, it is the crime of a 
madman." 1 The moral dilemma in this argument is, 
indeed, addressed to one who may be supposed to have still 
a love of virtue in general, and a detestation of that which 
it would be cowardly to do ; but even those who are 
insensible to the better motive, may feel at least the force 
of the selfish one ; and if the secret history of the hearts of 
all the malignant were known, and the feelings also known, 
with which they are universally regarded, — it would appear 
in the estimate of all which is gained and all which is lost, 

1 De St, Lambert, CEuy. Philosophiques, tome ii. p. 251. 



224 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



that detraction is truly madness or folly, as much as it is 
guilt. 

But, if the tale which we love to whisper he just, can it 
be a crime to lament oyer guilt that is real? It is not a 
crime to lament over guilt, if we do lament over it. But if 
we do truly lament over the probable appearances of it, we 
shall not be very eager to circulate a doubt that may be 
injurious, till we have reason ourselves, not to doubt merely, 
but to believe. I do not wish to recommend that weakness 
of humanity, which, in the world, often passes current for 
virtue, though it implies rather a defect of moral feeling, 
than any refinement of it, — or which at least, if it be virtue, 
is a virtue that can hear of oppression, and even witness 
it, without feeling indignation against the oppressor ; and 
which rather would see a thousand repetitions of the injury, 
than give to the wicked the name and the odium which he 
deserves. When crimes are walking secretly in darkness, 
as much as when they present themselves proudly in the 
very sunshine of day, it is our duty, to the innocent who 
have suffered, to give them the consolation of our sympathy, 
in the indignant feeling of their wrongs, as it is our duty 
to the innocent who may suffer, to call them to beware. 
Even in denouncing guilt, however, the office which we 
exercise is an office of duty not of pleasure. It is to be 
exercised, not with the eagerness of one who rejoices in 
discovering something which he may condemn, but with the 
sorrow of a lover of humankind, who is forced to add 
another moral ill to the catalogue of human delinquencies. 
Such are the feelings of a generous spirit, even when the 
vice which it discovers is of a species that implies more 
than ordinary moral turpitude ; and when it discovers only 
such foibles as are not inconsistent with the ordinary 
proportion of human virtue, it will love rather to speak of 
the virtue than of the failing ; it will think not of what the 
individual is only, but of what human nature is ; and will 
not withhold from one the indulgence which it must extend 



THE CHARACTER OF OTHERS. 225 

to all, and of which it must even, on some occasions, have 
too good reason for wishing the extension to itself. 

When the propagators of tales of scandal think that they 
have completely justified themselves, by declaring that all 
which they have said is true, they forget that there are 
virtues of which they are silent, that are true, as well as 
the defects of which they speak with such minute and exact 
remembrance ; and that, if they were to omit all notice of 
what is excellent in a character, and to cull only what is 
defective, the most illustrious of mankind, without any 
positive violation of biographic truth, might soon cease to 
be illustrious. 

When detraction arises from envy, malice, or motives of 
sordid interest, it is evident that it can be cured only by 
the cure of the passions from which it springs. But though 
these, at first sight, might seem to be the common sources 
of defamation, it is to another source that it is chiefly to be 
traced ; to the mere flippancy of the gay and the idle, and the 
necessity of filling up with amusement of some sort a 
conversation that would flag but for this ever ready 
resource. In these circumstances, nothing is so quick to 
present itself as the fault of another, even though we may 
have fairly begun with speaking of his virtues. " What 
pleasure, it has been truly said, can two or three persons 
have together, who have no mutual esteem, whose hearts 
are as void of feeling as their heads are void of ideas ! 
What charm could their conversation possess without the 
aid of a little scandal ! The sacrifice of a third person is 
almost always the chief pleasure of a tete-a-tete. A vain 
idler, who would otherwise be as wearisome to every body 
as he is weary of himself, speaks to men and women of the 
same character. He flatters, at the expense of the absent, 
their vanity and their envy ; he thus animates their languor, 
and they pay him in the same coin. If he is gifted with 
some imagination, and can express agreeably the flattering 
things which he wishes to appear to think of you, and the 

L 2 



226 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



evil which he thinks of others, he is treated and caressed, 
becomes the favourite of every circle, and will continue for 
his whole life to cultivate the talent of slandering grace- 
fully." I 

There is considerable truth in a remark of another 
French writer, to the same purport, " That there is now- 
adays less scandal than there was formerly, because there 
is more play. Cards," he says, " have saved more reputa- 
tions than a whole host of itinerant preachers could have 
done, though their only business had been to preach against 
evil-speaking. But we cannot play always; and, there- 
fore, we must sometimes amuse onrselves with a little 
defamation." 

The moral conclusion to be drawn from this remark is, 
that what cards may thus have tended in part to do, may 
be effected by other better means. If scandal arise in a 
great measure from poverty of conversation, it will diminish 
in proportion as minds become more cultivated, so as not 
to have every subject of discussion exhausted, when the 
health of the visiter and of the visited, having once been 
ascertained, cannot again with any decency be made a 
subject of inquiry, and when the meteorology of the day 
and of the season has, after a little debate, been settled in 
all its physical exactness. It is to this general increase of 
mental cultivation that the lessening of scandal is to be 
attributed, far more than to mere card-playing ; which, 
even when the use of cards was more prevalent than now, 
could afford only a suspension of hostilities that were ever 
ready to begin again with new violence when the game 
was finished, with perhaps a little additional bitterness on 
the part of the losers, against the vices of the wicked, and 
the frailties of the weak. The only true and permanent 
source of peace and amity with the faults of the absent, is 
that interest in better subjects which enables the present 



1 De St. Lambert, OEuy. Phil, tome ii. p. 250. 



THE CHARACTER OF OTHERS. 



227 



to animate tbeir conversation, and to sustain it in rich 
variety, without the necessity of wandering to that last 
resource which marks the folly of the head still more than 
the uncharitableness of the heart. It is pleasing to trace in 
this, as in all its other influences, the connexion of intel- 
lectual culture with the virtues which it not merely em- 
bellishes but invigorates ; to perceive that philosophy which, 
in senates and councils, teaches purer humanity to states- 
men and kings, extend its gentle influence to the private 
circle, and diffuse a more amiable cheerfulness on the very 
pleasures of the gay. 

The next duty of which we have to treat is that of vera- 
city, which relates to the knowledge or belief of others, as 
capable of being affected by the meanings, true or false, 
which our words or our conduct may convey ; and consists 
in the faithful conformity of our language, or of our con- 
duct when it is intended tacitly to supply the place of 
language, to the truth which we profess to deliver, or, at 
least, to that which is at the time believed by us to be true. 

So much of the happiness of social life is derived from 
the use of language, and so profitless would the mere power 
of language be, but for the truth which dictates it, that the 
abuse of the confidence which is placed in our declarations, 
may not merely be in the highest degree injurious to the 
individual deceived, but would tend, if general, to throw 
back the whole race of mankind into that barbarism from 
which they have emerged, and progressively ascended 
through still purer air and still brighter sunshine to that 
noble height which they have reached. It is not wonderful, 
therefore, that veracity, so important to the happiness of 
all, and yet subject to so many temptations of personal 
interest in the violation of it, should, in all nations, have 
had a high place assigned to it among the virtues. 

That, in the case of a virtue, so essential to the commerce 
of life, man should have been led instinctively to the 
practice of it, would not of itself appear absurd, or even 



228 



OF VERACITY. 



very wonderful, to those who consider the other instructive 
tendencies in our constitution ; and since all, in uttering 
falsehood, are conscious of an effort which represses the 
truth that seems to start of itself to the lips, and all seem 
to believe what is told them, till the experience of frequent 
deceit have induced some degree of doubt in the young 
listener, who begins to be a sceptic, it has been supposed, 
by many philosophers, that there are, in our nature, two 
instinctive tendencies adapted to each other, — a tendency 
to speak truth, and a tendency to believe what is spoken. 

On this subject it is perhaps not very easy to decide with 
absolute confidence ; since it must be admitted by all, that, 
whether there were, or were not, such original tendencies 
in the mind, they now do truly form a part of it, — that we 
have a disposition to speak truth, as often as we speak, 
without any positive motive to be deceitful ; and a disposi- 
tion to believe what is related to us, if in the circumstances 
of the relater there be no obvious interest in falsehood, and 
in the circumstances of the narrative itself no apparent 
improbability. But since principles are not to be multiplied 
without urgent necessity, I confess that I do not see, in the 
phenomena of veracity and belief, sufficient reason to assert 
peculiar instincts, as concerned in the production of them, 
since they admit of a sufficient explanation by other more 
general principles. 

That there is a love of society in man, and a desire of 
sympathetic feeling in the society that is loved, I am far 
from denying ; and if this general love of sympathy with 
our feelings, to which truth contributes, were all which is 
meant by the assertors of instinctive veracity, it would be 
absurd to object to the principle. But this is not what is 
meant by the assertors of the doctrine. The tendency of 
which they speak is an instinct additional ; and it is to this 
additional instinct only that the remarks which I have to 
offer are meant to be applied. 

If in our inquiry we are to go back to the very origin of 



t 



OF VERACITY. 229 

language, it may be presumed that some want, or wish, 
would be felt when words were uttered. The very motive, 
therefore, which led to the use of speech, would lead to the 
truth of it; since no wish could be attained by the use of 
language, unless the wish were truly expressed. It surely 
cannot seem wonderful that the expression of wants should 
be sincere ; though it might, indeed, have seemed very 
wonderful if, with the wish of obtaining food from a brother 
savage, the savage had employed his power of utterance 
only to declare that he was not hungry. He might speak 
falsehoods on some occasion, indeed, on the same principle 
as that which led him on ordinary occasions to be sincere ; 
that is to say, from the influence of a powerful desire. He 
would have some secret wish to gratify by the deceit, and, 
having this wish, he might say what was not, as he was 
before in the habit of saying what was. 

What is true of the savage is true of the child. He too 
has wishes to gratify ; and he speaks truth, because the 
expression of his wishes must be truth. Nor is this all : 
The simple laws of suggestion, on which the use of arbitrary 
signs depend, have themselves an obvious relation to 
veracity, that connects the utterance of the tongue with 
the emotions of the heart. Language, as a mere series of 
symbols, is associated with certain feelings. The feeling of 
warmth, for example, is more closely associated with the 
verbal sign that expresses it, than with any other of the 
various signs of which language is composed ; and when we 
think of this feeling, the word " warmth" will occur more 
readily than any other. It is the same with all our other 
feelings. They suggest, of themselves, by mere association, 
the corresponding phrases expressive of them ; and truth is 
the result of this very suggestion. We are conscious of an 
effort in speaking falsehood, because, but for this effort, our 
feelings would of themselves suggest their corresponding 
signs ; and we have thus to repress the truth that rises 
spontaneously, and to invent laboriously the combinations 



230 



OF VERACITY. 



of words that are in discord with our belief. What wonder 
i3 there that, when we walk through a meadow in a sunny 
evening of autumn, there should arise to the mind, and thus 
to ready utterance, phrases expressive of the real feelings — 
How beautiful is this scene, and how happy these cattle 
appear! — rather than phrases which have no connexion with 
the real feelings, and which cannot be supposed, therefore, 
to be readily uttered, because they are not readily suggested; 
phrases which would say, What a scene of ruggedness and 
sterility is this before us, aud how terrible are those wolves 
and tigers ! When the common laws of association are 
reversed, by which things signified suggest their signs, as 
conversely signs suggest the objects or feelings which they 
signify, — then, indeed, it may be necessary, in accounting 
for the accordance of words and sentiments, to have recourse 
to a peculiar instinct of veracity. 

There seems, then, no necessity for a peculiar instinct to 
account for the general tendency to speak truth rather than 
falsehood, independently of all moral consideration of the 
difference of truth and falsehood ; though this moral feeling 
in aid of the common principle of association, and of the 
general love of sympathy, is certainly an important element 
in the habitual production of truth. As little reason does 
there appear to be for the supposition of a peculiar corres- 
ponding instinct of credulity. All which seems necessary 
to account for this, is the influence of common experience. 

If there be, as we have seen, some very obvious reasons 
to account for the tendency to speak truth, those who hear 
must, for the same reason, be hearers of truth ; and they 
who are in the constant, or almost constant, habit of hear- 
ing truth, will of course, from the same principle which 
directs their reasoning in other cases, soon learn to draw 
the conclusion, that what is said may be regarded almost 
with certainty to be true. It would be as wonderful that 
they should not draw this conclusion as to general truth, 
from the general concurrence of the phenomena, as that 



OF VERACITY. 



231 



they should not draw a similar general conclusion with 
respect to any of the laws of nature in which a similar con- 
currence was discovered. If all men had universally 
spoken truth, all men would universally, in consequence 
of this uniform connexion, have believed truth ; or if we 
deny this consequence, it would really be difficult for us to 
explain why we do not put our hand as readily in the fire 
as in water, or jump down a precipice with as little fear as 
we walk along a plain. But all men do not speak truth 
as certainly as fire burns ; and therefore we believe in the 
one case with some little doubt, in the other case with cer- 
tainty. It seems to us more probable that what is said to 
us is true, than that it is untrue ; the probability increasing, 
in our estimation, according to the circumstances in which 
we have previously found truth to he most exactly con- 
formable to the declarations made, and in many cases making 
a near approximation to absolute certainty ; because in cases 
of the same sort, we have rarely, if ever, discovered any 
disagreement of the fact and the assertion. That, even if 
we possess the instinctive credulity supposed, we yet do 
not believe every thing which is told us, must be admitted 
by those who contend for the principle. And why do we 
not believe whatever is told us ? The only answer which 
can be given by them is, that we do not believe every thing 
because we have occasionally been deceived : and if the 
doubt can be explained by the experience of the small 
number of instances in which we have been deceived, why 
may not the tendency to the moderate assent, that is 
tempered by this little mixture of doubt, be admitted to 
arise, in like manner, from our experience of the greater 
number of instances in which we have not been deceived ? 

That we should be more credulous in childhood than in 
mature life, is not wonderful, when we consider that the 
probabilities of truth are always far greater than the 
probabilities of falsehood ; that the discovery of many of 
the possible motives to falsehood, on which our doubt in 



232 



OF VERACITY. 



after-life is founded, requires an analysis much nicer than 
children can be supposed to perform ; and that it is the very 
nature of the mind, when untrained to habits of reflection, 
to think only of the majority of cases when the number is 
very greatly superior, and to forget the few exceptions. 
The general analogies of a language are, in this way, made 
absolutely universal by a child, as they are in many in- 
stances, too, so regarded by the vulgar, who understand, 
indeed, the irregular inflections when pronounced, but con- 
tinue, in their own discourse, to employ the more general 
forms of termination in the particular substantives and 
verbs, in which grammatical usage requires a departure 
from the ordinary rules of inflection. The child will learn 
to doubt better as he will learn to speak more idiomati- 
cally ; but still the too regular language which he uses does 
not flow from any peculiar instinct, nor does the too regular 
belief. 

The only original principle that seems to me to be truly 
concerned in the phenomena of veracity, at least the only 
principle in addition to the general social propensity by 
which we delight in the sympathy of other's, is the suscepti- 
bility of moral emotion, to the influence of which, in aiding 
habits of truth, I have already alluded. We feel that in 
injuring another in his belief we are guilty of what is 
morally wrong ; as we feel that we are guilty of moral 
wrong in injuring any one, however slightly, in his person 
or his property. We abstain from the one species of in- 
jury, therefore, as we abstain from the other ; and though 
I cannot think that we speak truth, from an instinctive 
propensity that is independent of all experience or reflec- 
tion, I have no doubt that we speak it, in many cases, from 
a moral disapprobation of deceit, which is itself the result 
of a tendency as truly original as any of our instincts. 



OF OUR NEGATIVE DUTIES. 



233 



LECTURE XIII. 

OF OUR NEGATIVE DUTIES CONTINUED: — OF ABSTAINING FROM IN- 
JURING THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS, EITHER DIRECTLY BY OCR SEDUC- 
TIONS, OR INDIRECTLY BY OUR EXAMPLE — OF ABSTAINING FROM 
INJURING THE MENTAL TRANQUILLITY OF OTHERS. 

In my last Lecture, in prosecution of the inquiry on 
which we had entered into the great class of negative 
duties, I considered those which relate to our power of in- 
juring others in three very important respects : in the 
affection of those whom they love — in their general repu- 
tation — and in their knowledge or belief, as affected by 
the confidence which they attach to our false declarations. 
There still remain two other modes of injury to be con- 
sidered by us, in the two corresponding negative duties to 
which they give rise. 

Of these, the next in order is the dangerous power which 
we may exercise over the virtue of another. 

This power over the virtues of others may be exercised 
in two ways ; directly by our seductions ; indirectly by our 
example. 

The very name seduction excites immediately the thought 
of one particular form of allurement to guilt, to which that 
name is peculiarly affixed ; and which deserves this pecu- 
liar distinction, by the amount of irreparable injury that 
may thus be produced by the persuasion of a few fatal 
moments. The remarks, however, which I made in my 
last Lecture on the crime of adultery, are in many respects 
so applicable to this, as to render superfluous any long dis- 
cussion of the evil which the seducer perpetrates, and of 
the selfishness which must be in the heart before it could 
meditate so much evil. There is not, indeed, in simple 
seduction, the theft of affection belongiug to another, of 
which the adulterer is guilty ; but there is the theft of the 



2U 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



affection of the individual herself, the fraudulent acquisition 
of it by falsehoods and artifices, which in every other 
species of intercourse would be universally considered as 
lasting disgrace ; and which are surely not less disgraceful 
when the wretchedness produced by the fraud is far greater 
than any other fraud could produce, and is the wretched- 
ness of one of whom man, who betrays her foudness, was 
appointed the protector. Whatever other consequences 
may attend the treachery of the seducer, there is, as in 
adultery, at least in almost every case, the production of 
misery to more than the individual directly betrayed ; to a 
whole family perhaps, that lose in a single moment, as if 
by some sudden desolation or total change of scene, what- 
ever was delightful in the thought of the past, or a pro- 
mise of delight in the thought of the future; and that must 
either cease to love one whom it would be agony to aban- 
don, or retain a love that involves more intense and lasting 
anguish, because it is the love of one who never can be 
happy. But, though there were no parent or friend to 
share her sufferings, and to aggravate them to her by this 
very participation, there is still the great sufferer herself, 
the production of present guilt, and future shame and 
misery, that admit almost as little of consolation as of 
remedy, to one, for whom the producer of all this moral 
depravation and anguish of heart professes feelings which 
he honours with the name of love, and who, in the dreadful 
sacrifices which she has made, has shown too strongly the 
force of that attachment of which he has availed himself to 
render her his victim. If it be justly considered as adding 
tenfold horror to the crime of murder, that he on whom 
death was inflicted was a friend and benefactor of the as- 
sassin, and forgave the deadly blow even while he recog- 
nised the arm from which it came, what weight of guilt 
does the very love which, even after ruin, still lingers in 
her gentle heart that was betrayed, add to the atrocious 
selfishness of him who rejoiced to perceive the tenderness 



THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS. 



235 



of love, only as a proof that his artifices had not been 
wasted ; who, in abandoning her afterwards to all her 
misery, regretted only the difficulty which he might have 
in shaking off a love so obstinate ; and on receiving, per- 
haps, one of those letters of upbraiding, in which, in the 
very vehemence of indignation, it is still evident that it is 
love which upbraids, — could see those gleams of tender- 
ness, with no other thought than that of gratified vanity, — 
a conscious pride of attractions, which might succeed with 
other hearts, as they had succeeded with that heart, over 
which they still retained so lasting a hold, 

The period which intervenes between the first artifices of 
the seducer, and the misery to which he is ultimately to 
give occasion, surely does not lessen his guilt, as a moral 
agent, deliberately planning those very means of wretched- 
ness. Let us imagine, then, gathered into one terrible 
moment, all this amount of wretchedness, — the distrac- 
tion of parents, the tears of sisters, the shame and remorse 
of the frail outcast ; or perhaps, in the dreadful progress of 
depravation of what once was shame and remorse, a wild 
excess of guilt, that seeks only to forget the past, and that 
scarcely knows, in the distraction of many acquired vices, 
wdiat it is which constitutes at the moment the anguish 
which it feels : if all this combination of miseries could be 
made visible, as it were, to the very eyes of the seducer in 
a single moment, and the instant production of it were to 
depend on a single word of renewed solicitation on his 
part ; what love, I will not say, but even what passion that 
calls itself love, in any human breast, can we conceive to 
be so unmoved by such a sight, as to utter calmly a word 
so destructive ? And if a single moment of the miserable 
result be so dreadful to be contemplated, how much more 
terrible is it when regarded as the misery of years — of 
years that, after their course of earthly wretchedness is 
finished, consign to immortality a spirit, that, but for the 
guilt of him who rendered it what it is, might have looked 



236 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



back upon the earth with the calm pleasure of those who 
turn their eyes on a scene which their acts of virtue have 
rendered delightful, and quit it only for scenes which they 
are to render delightful, by the continuance of similar acts, 
or wishes of virtue. 

It is this species of seduction of the purity of female love, 
as I have said, to which the name is usually attached. But 
there are vicious seductions of as many kinds as there are 
vicious objects to be obtained by vicious means. He who 
knowingly and wilfully lessens a single virtue in the heart 
of another, or introduces into it a single vice, or increases 
the power of any guilty passion, is a seducer ; guilty him- 
self to the extent at least, or more than the extent, of the 
guilt which he occasions. The flatterer is a seducer ; and, 
in thinking of flattery, we are not to think only of the 
courts of kings, and of the palaces of those who have 
almost the splendour of kings. There is a scale, which 
comprehends in it all mankind ; a scale of the great, who 
are great to those beneath them, as they are little to those 
above them ; and every where there are flatterers, because 
at every point of the scale there is some little power or 
patronage, which can gratify some little desire, that corre- 
sponds with the gifts which the flatterers of flatterers can 
offer to those who pay to them a similar homage. As it 
would be difficult to find any one too great to be the sub- 
ject of adulation, it would be difficult also to find one too 
little to be the subject of it, if only we could find one still 
meaner, who might look to him with hope. Of the various 
corruptions, therefore, with which virtue may be assailed, 
flattery is not merely one of the most powerful, but the 
most general of all ; because it is at once the most easy to 
be offered, and the surest to be received. " We believe 
that we hate flattery," says La Rochefoucault, " when all 
which we hate is the awkwardness of the flatterer." It is 
the very nature of this species of blandishment, as has 
been truly remarked, to please even when rejected ; and 



THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS. 



237 



however frequently refused admission, to be admitted at last. 
"Habent hoc in se naturale blanditiae : etiam cum rejiciuntur 
placent ; saepe exclusae, novissirne recipiuntur." 

Flattery, then, the fosterer of vanity, and often of affec- 
tions more degrading, implies, in whatever station the 
flatterer and the flattered may be, a disregard of the virtue 
of others, which in itself is no slight vice. But the sly 
bribery of praise is not the only bribery with which human 
selfishness would strive to seduce human selfishness. There 
are grosser bribes, which those who count themselves 
honourable men, and are aspiring to stations of still higher 
honour, have no hesitation in employing for the furtherance 
of useful vice. A little perjury, real or implied, is all 
which they require ; and they are content to pay for it its 
fair market price, or even to raise a little the market price, 
if perjury should have grown more reluctant than before, 
or more skilful in the calculation of its own exact value. 
It is painful to think, that an offence against public morals, 
of such serious import, should be so lightly estimated by 
those who strive to forget their own delinquency, in the 
equal and familiar delinquency of others ; as if the very 
wideness of guilt were not an additional reason for ceasing 
to contribute to that which has been already so extensively 
baneful ; — and that the first step to the legislation of the 
freest and most virtuous nation on the earth, to the noblest 
of all the trusts which a nation can bestow, — that of enact- 
ing the means by which its own tendencies to guilt may be 
lessened, — should, in so many instances, be the purchase of 
a crime, or of many crimes. 

If, however, the purchase even of a few crimes be an 
offence so worthy of reprehension, not merely for the 
encouragement which it gives to the venal barterers of 
their conscience, but still more for the corruption of moral 
principle which it tends to diffuse through the whole com- 
munity, what deeper reprobation belongs to those to whom 
this general debasement of a people is itself an object of 



238 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



desire ; who can see millions sunk in ignorance, and in all 
the vices of ignorance, and know the means which might 
have accelerated their moral progress, and rejoice with a 
secret triumph that they have been instrumental in with- 
holding them. How many nations are there on the earth, 
in which nothing is so much feared by those who have the 
miserable charge of the general servitude, as that man 
should become a little nobler than it is possible for him to 
be, when he has to bow his head at the feet of the 
oppressor; and in which the diffusion of knowledge is 
dreaded, as the diffusion of that which the slave cannot feel 
long, and continue to be a slave. To withhold, for purposes 
of selfish gain, the means by which the moral condition of 
a state might be ameliorated, is to be guilty of an injury to 
virtue, compared with the atrocity of which, the guilt of 
seducing to vice a single individual, is as insignificant as 
would be the crime of a single assassination, compared with 
the butchery of millions in the massacre of a whole nation, of 
which none were to survive but the murderers themselves, 
and those by whom the murder was sanctioned and applauded. 

The various species of seduction which we have been 
considering, have had some object of direct personal gain 
in view. The betrayer of female innocence has previously 
yielded himself to the control of appetites and passions, 
that are to him what reason and morality are to the good, 
and that must be gratified, though he seek the gratification 
of them in misery itself. The flatterer seeks the favour of 
him whom he flatters, and seeks it usually for interests, 
without which the mere favour would be of little value to 
him. The briberies of money, or place, or pension, present 
or future, near or remote, or whatever else can be offered 
to the rapacity of avarice or ambition, or of all the passions 
which avarice and ambition can gratify, are not gifts or 
promises that are gratuitous, but expect a return of profit 
of some sort to the passions of the briber. Even those who 
delight in keeping nations in ignorance and servility, and 



THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS. 



239 



who care not how many vices may accompany or flow from 
these, still see the connexion of servility as an effect, with 
ignorance as a cause; and, perhaps, would have no great 
objection to allow a little more wisdom to a people, if they 
were to become more obsequious by their wisdom, or to 
remain even as truly slaves in heart as before. There is 
one species of corruption, however, which is exercised from 
a love of the corruption itself, or at least from the mere 
pleasure of companionship in guilt, — a spirit of malicious 
proselytism, which forms the last dreadful stage of vice ; 
when the gray-headed veteran of debaucheries that began in 
youth, and have been matured by a long life of unceasing 
excess in all that is gross and depraved, till he have 
acquired a sort of oracular gravity of profligacy among 
gayer profligates, collects around him his band of youthful 
disciples, whom he has gathered wherever his watchful eye 
could mark out another victim ; relates to them the tales 
of merriment of other years, as an excitement to present 
passions ; observes in each the few virtues which will need 
even yet to be repressed, the irresolute vices that will 
require to be strengthened ; and, if on some ingenuous cheek 
a blush should still arise, marks it with a sort of joy, that 
almost calculates the moment of triumph when that blush 
shall have been washed away, to appear again no more. 
If there be a being on this earth whom it is permitted to 
us to hate with full and absolute detestation, it is surely a 
human demon like this ; and, if we could trace through all 
its haunts the licentiousness of a single great city, — from 
the splendid gaming-house of the rich to the obscure 
chambers of vulgar riot, in which the dissolute of another 
order assemble to plan the frauds or robberies of the night, 
or to turn to the only uses to which they know how to 
turn them, the frauds or robberies of the preceding day, — 
of how many demons of this class should we trace the 
horrible power, in the lessons which they are giving, and the 
results of lessons which have been given ! 



240 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



With these circumstances, which lead to the intentional 
and wilful corruption of others, is unfortunately often joined 
the vanity of a display of profligacy, surpassing the concep- 
tion of ordinary profligates, or the equally hurtful vanity 
of an audacious wit, that can dare to jest, where others, if 
they do not revere as the pure revere, are at least accus- 
tomed to tremble as the superstitious tremble. How many 
are there who assume the appearance of this audacity which 
they do not feel, shuddering perhaps with a secret horror 
of conscience at the very epigram in which they seem to 
have been gaily impious, when they poured out their merry 
obscenities, or still merrier blasphemy. There are other 
minds, which have a due abhorrence of all such blasphemy, 
when the blasphemy is in verse ; who require most rigidly 
that it be in prose, and have too great regard for the virtue 
and holiness of man, to allow them to be corrupted by the 
licentious iniquity of rhyming. If, however, they can in- 
vent an argument which may logically make man miser- 
able by mood and figure, — an argument that, to those who 
are not very nice distinguishes of truth, and the semblance 
of truth, may seem to prove God to be only a sort of poetic 
personification, and virtue and immortality to be words as 
meaningless, — they have no hesitation in supposing that 
the happiness of mankind, which the credit of an epigram 
should not be allowed to outweigh, is yet too light in the 
scale to be poised against the credit of any acute sophistry 
that can be wrought into the form of a philosophic disser- 
tation. They are too wise not to discern that the evident 
tendency of that which they value only as acute, is to 
corrupt human virtue, and extinguish the best hopes and 
consolations of human suffering. But it is sufficient com- 
fort to them, that if they render miserable those whose 
virtue they corrupt, they have at least not corrupted them 
without the observance of some of the most exact techni- 
calities of logic. 

Such are various forms of direct corruption, in which we 



THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS. 



241 



are seducers to vice. It is not by direct and intentional cor- 
ruption only, however, that we produce injury to the virtue 
of others. There is an indirect influence, which, in some 
situations, is not less injurious, — the influence of example. 

We are formed to live together in society ; and in those 
who are to live together, it is necessary for happiness, and 
almost for social union, that there should be some resem- 
blance of manners, and agreement of sentiment, at least in 
the general subjects in which the interests of all are equally 
involved. To this agreement the various humours of man- 
kind, and the very different circumstances in which different 
individuals of the same society are placed, would seem 
indeed to oppose causes of division that are almost insuper- 
able. By one principle of the mind, however, — the prin- 
ciple of suggestion, or, as it is commonly termed, the prin- 
ciple of association, — nature has in a great measure softened 
down the most prominent and offensive peculiarities. 
What we have seen done in one situation, is recalled to us 
by the very feeling of this situation, when we are placed 
in it ; and, as it arises to us thus more readily, and is 
sometimes, perhaps, the only mode of conduct which arises 
clearly to our mind, we proceed on it without farther re- 
flection, and act in a certain manner, because others have 
acted in a certain manner, and because we have seen 
them act, or heard of their action. It is evident, that 
in resolving to act in a certain manner, on any occasion 
we mst have had a previous conception of the manner in 
which the action may be performed ; and that we may 5 
therefore, often prefer one mode of action, from the advan- 
tages which it seems to present, when it would not have 
been preferred in competition with other modes of action, 
still more advantageous, but not conceived at the time. 
The wise, indeed, on this very account, even when they 
see good that may flow from one mode of conduct, pause 
to consider various possibilities, and appreciate the differ- 
ences of the good and the better ; but how few are the wise! 

M 



242 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



and how much more numerous they who, when any imme- 
diate good presents itself, do not wait to consider whether 
a better may not be found. The first conceptions that arise 
are the conceptions which regulate half their conduct ; and 
these first conceptions, when the circumstances of the case 
are similar, are, by the natural influence of association, the 
conceptions either of what they have themselves done be- 
fore, or of what others were observed to do in those similar 
circumstances. It is impossible to will any particular 
action, without having previously conceived that particular 
action ; and the various consequences of various modes of 
conduct have seldom entered into the contemplation of the 
multitude. They see what others do ; and their thought 
has scarcely wandered beyond what is commonly before 
their eyes, or what is the subject of common discourse. 
As soon, therefore, as similar circumstances recur, the image 
recurs of what has been thus familiar to them ; and it 
recurs more strongly and vividly, because its influence is 
not lessened by that of any other accompanying image. 
They act, therefore, as others have acted, not so much from 
a feeling of respect for general sentiment, as from mere 
ignorance, and the absence of any other conception that 
might give a different momentary impulse. They see only 
one path, and they move on, accordingly, in that only path 
which their dim and narrow glance is capable of perceiving. 

How powerfully the conduct is influenced by any vivid 
conception, is shown very strikingly in those phenomena of 
panic terror to which I have more than once alluded for 
illustration, because they throw light on many of the most 
perplexing phenomena of the mind. When astonishment 
is once produced in any very lively degree, however rich 
in knowledge a mind may have been, it is, for the moment, 
like the ignorant minds around. It cannot deliberate and 
choose, because no objects of choice occur to it. What is 
called presence of mind, is only such a state of mastery of 
the feeling of astonishment, and other lively emotions, as 



THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS. 



243 



allows the conceptions to arise which would have arisen if 
there had been no circumstances productive of lively 
emotion ; and the want of presence of mind is the tempo- 
rary want of such conceptions, from the overwhelming 
influence of one lively emotion. The image of what others 
are doing, is therefore the only image before the mind ; and 
each individual thus augments and multiplies the panic, by 
presenting to others the ready image of that flight, which, 
as presented to him by those who were first to fly, had 
made him for the moment that cowardly thing which, in 
hours of freer choice, he would have conceived it impossible 
for him to become. 

In every case of this species of moral sway, then, it is to 
the similar influence of mere suggestion, in presenting to us 
a clear image of one mode of conduct out of many possible 
modes, that are not conceived so distinctly, because they 
have never been seen, that I am inclined to ascribe the 
chief part of that power which is attributed, and justly 
attributed, to example ; though to this direct influence of 
the principle must be added various indirect and auxiliary 
influences of it, in the notions of moral worth, or dignity of 
character, of those who performed the action before ; or the 
remembrance even of accidental circumstances of pride or 
pleasure, that may have been connected with it. When all 
the direct and indirect influences of the suggesting principle, 
then, are added together, it cannot seem wonderful that 
there should be such a propensity in the great imitator^ 
man, to moral imitation ; and that the conduct of him who 
is born to-day, should depend almost as much on the nature 
of the minds of those who are to surround him hereafter, 
as on the nature of the mind that is animating his own 
little frame. 

In considering the influence of example on national 
virtue, we are too apt to think only of the authority of 
those who are placed in eminent stations ; and to forget the 
more direct influence of domestic examples on those 



2U 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



individuals, who must always indeed be ranked as in- 
dividuals, but whose virtues or vices united are the virtues 
or vices of the nation. The example of the great may give 
the primary impulse, but the force descends progressively 
from rank to rank ; and each is affected chiefly by those 
who are around him, or a very little above him. The 
parents who hang over our cradle, thinking for us, before 
we have formed what can be called a thought, and who 
continue, during life, to be viewed by us with a peculiar 
sort of tender veneration, which no other created being 
seems to us entitled to possess, — the comrades of our 
pastimes in boyhood, and the friends who partake with us 
the graver occupations, and graver pastimes of our maturer 
years, — these are they who transfuse into us their feelings, 
and from whom, without thinking of them as examples, we 
derive all that good or evil which example can afford ; and 
yield ourselves more completely to the influence, because 
we are not aware that we are yielding to any influence 
whatever. To be frequently with the good is to know, on 
almost every occasion, how the good would act in the 
situation in which we are placed, and to feel, at the same 
time, that reverence for the action itself as it seems to us 
recommended by their choice, which we must have felt for 
those whom we imagine as performers of it. Whatever 
impresses on us strongly the image of the virtuous, there- 
fore, cannot be indifferent to our virtue. The very meeting 
of a great man, as Seneca strongly says, may be of lasting 
advantage to us; and we derive instruction even from his 
very silence. " Nulla res magis animis honesta induit, 
dubiosque et in pravum inclinabiles revocat ad rectum, 
quam bonorum virorum conversatio. Paullatim enim 
descendit in pectora ; et vim prseceptorum obtinet fre- 
quenter audiri, adspici frequenter. Occursus mehercule 
ipse sapientium juvat ; et est aliquid, quod ex magno viro, 
vel te cente, proficias." 1 

1 Senecse Epist, xcir. 



THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS. 



245 



It is this universal radiation of example, reflecting light 
upon example, which forms the moral splendour of an age ; 
without some portion of the light of which good laws are 
powerless, and with which it is almost a matter of little 
moment, at least to the existing generation, how few the 
laws may be under which good men are living in peace. 
" When a citizen is inspired by the genius of virtue," says 
an eloquent declaimer on morals, " he feels no embarrass- 
ment in those cases for which the law has made no 
provision. His own heart is his legislator. He has there 
a species of instinct, less likely to err than even reason 
itself. A good man divines, as it were, good laws, that, as 
laws, are yet unexisting. It is not so much in the head, 
indeed, that the true genius of legislation has its seat, as in 
the heart ; and wise as Solon and Lycurgus were, who can 
doubt that they had still more virtue than wisdom ? 
When Rome was in peril, what was her resource ? She 
did not form new laws. She ordered the laws to be silent, 
and gave herself up to the guidance and example of a single 
good man. The conscience of Camillus was, for a long 
time, all the legislation of Rome. That Rome, which had 
scarcely begun to exist, was already almost expiring under 
the assault of the Gauls. But what is there which a great 
man cannot do, when he is sure of the courage and of the 
virtue of his fellow citizens ! Rome, delivered by his arm, 
had no longer a foe to dread ; and with her proud morals, 
and but a handful of laws, rose from the very brink of the 
grave, to march like a queen to the conquest of the universe. 
The firmness of Brutus, the good faith of Regulus, the 
moderation of Ciucinnatus, the calm probity of Fabricius, 
the chastity of the Lucretias and Virginias, the disin- 
terestedness of Paulus iEmilius, the patience of Fabius, — 
these were the best laws of Rome. A virtuous man is a 
living law, — he is more: precepts can only point to us 
what tract we should pursue, but examples hurry us along. 
What a difference there is between a law that speaks but 



246 



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once, and Cato ever acting ! This Cato was to Rome its 
thirteenth table of laws ; and without the thirteenth, how 
defective would the twelve others have been i" 

The influence of moral feeling is, indeed, what this 
author considers it to be, the supplement of the deficiencies 
of law ; the thirteenth table of the early laws of Rome, and 
many volumes of statutes, where laws are more voluminous, 
The direct power of example, then, in those who surround 
us, and whose conduct is the first to rise to our conception, 
in all the similar circumstances in which ourselves are 
placed, is a power whicii the unreflecting can scarcely fail 
to obey. But though chiefly to be traced to those who 
mingle with us in the familiar scenes and occurrences of 
domestic life, the influence is yet referable in part also 
directly, and indirectly in a very high degree, to the 
smaller number, who do not so much surround us as shine 
upon us from a distance ; the eminent of every class, whose 
real dignity of merit, or even whose accidental dignity of 
station, has raised them to a height which brings their 
image frequently before us ; and presents it associated with 
all the respect which the heart readily pays to the one 
species of dignity, and which, for the peace and good order 
of states, it is necessary to pay in some degree to the other 
also — at least when the dignity of mere rank is not so 
dishonoured by the profligacy of its possessor, as to cover 
in our detestation of the profligacy, the feebler titles of the 
rank itself. 

It is this moral or immoral influence, in promoting or 
injuring the virtues of others, an influence of which it is 
impossible for them to divest themselves, that gives to those 
who are in any way distinguished above the crowd a fearful 
responsibility, with which they are unfortunately not 
always sufficiently impressed. It is not their own con- 
science only for which they are answerable, they are 
answerable also, in some measure, for the consciences of 
others. 



THE VIRTUE OF OTHERS. 



247 



Componitur orbis 
Regis ad exemplum; nec sic inflectere sensus 
Humanos edicta valent, ut vita regentis; 
Mobile mutatur semper cum principe vulgus. 

w Princeps optiraus," says Paterculus, with a forcible 
brevity of expression, 44 faciendo docet ; et licet sit imperio 
maximus, exemplo major est." 

In the life of a sovereign, then, there is nothing private. 
His friendships, his very amusements, are not friendships 
and amusements only : they are public virtue or public 
guilt. If he think more of the trappings of his state than 
of its duties ; if the splendour of some courtly festival be 
more important to him, than that noblest of spectacles which 
is to be found in the general happiness of a peaceful and 
virtuous land ; if the favourites of his private confidential 
hours, whom he thus offers to his people, as models of the 
conduct that is worthiest of being honoured, be those who 
are known to the world only by superior profligacy, and 
whom every virtuous father of a family would exclude 
from the dwelling of those for whose innocence he would 
tremble if the corrupters were admitted, there may be 
virtue still in that state ; but it is only because there are 
in it principles of virtue too powerful to be overcome by 
the vicious authority even of the most powerful. The guilt 
of the sovereign, however, in such circumstances, is to be 
estimated, not by the vices which have spread among his 
people,but by the vices which his own conduct has authorized; 
and would not be increased in the amount of its moral 
delinquency, though all mankind had become, what he has 
said, by his example and his favour, that it is noble to be. 
If, however, a prince be indeed what a prince should be, 
he has the comfort of knowing, that he is not enjoying only 
the happiness of virtue, but diffusing it ; that, since his 
actions must be lessons, they are lessons of good ; and that 
if, by his example, he exercise a sway more extensive than 
that of his laws or his arms, it is a sway which, like that 



248 



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of his laws and his arms, is exercised only for the happiness 
of the world. 

.An influence so extensive, indeed, belongs only to a few 
of mankind ; but even the humble must not think, on this 
account, that they have no influence. It is indirectly, I 
have already said, as spreading through them, that the 
influence of the powerful is chiefly exercised. In their 
homes, among their friends, on ail those who come within 
their little sphere, they exercise power over the vice or 
virtue of others, and thus indirectly an influence on the 
amount of moral good and evil in the world, in every future 
generation, — an influence which it is as little possible for 
them to shake off, as for the sovereign of many states to 
abdicate his moral sway, and to be a sovereign only with 
his sceptre or his sword. 

From this inevitable influence of example, by which 
every moral or immoral action that is perform ed by us may 
have consequences that never entered into our design or 
our wish when we planned or performed it, arises one very 
important duty, — the duty of attending to the appearances 
of our actions. It is not enough for us to have willed what 
is virtuous, and to have executed it by means that in them- 
selves imply no immorality, if they have been such as might 
lead others to suspect the purity of what was truly pure. 
The loss which we might ourselves suffer in this way, in 
our character and authority, is not the only evil, nor, in 
many cases, the greatest evil, of such seeming improprieties. 
We may, without due care as to appearances, act virtuously,, 
and yet give all the authority of our station and character 
to vice, — misleading those to whom our example may have 
the force of precept, and, perhaps, by some of the most 
generous sacrifices of which our nature is capable, inducing 
the inconsiderate, who suppose that they are imitating us,, 
to quit that moral good which we truly sought,, for the evil 
which we only seemed to them to pursue. 

The only remaining species of injury to others, the duty 



THE MENTAL TRANQUILLITY OF OTHERS. 249 



of abstaining from which we haye still to consider, is that 
which relates to their mental tranquillity. 

This, indeed, all the other species of injury already 
considered by us, tend indirectly to disturb. But the 
injury of which I speak at present, is the direct violation 
of the peace of others, by our immediate intentional 
influence on their feelings. 

In treating of the emotions of pride, particularly in the 
form of that haughtiness which the proud are so apt to 
assume, I have already treated of one of the most injurious 
influences of this sort, my remarks on which it would be 
unnecessary now to repeat. You must be sufficiently 
aware, that the aim of the haughty is to excite in others 
the mortifying feeling of their abject inferiority ; and that, 
if they could always produce the feelings which they wish 
to excite, they would not merely have all the guilt of a 
cruel tyranny, — for that they have, even in their most 
powerless wishes, but would truly, in their very effects, be 
the most severe of human tyrants. 

It is not the insolence of the haughty, however, which is 
the only intentional disquieter of others. There is a power 
in every individual, over the tranquillity of almost every 
individual. There are emotions latent in the mind of those 
whom we meet, which a few words of ours may at any time 
call forth ; and the moral influence which keeps this power 
over the uneasy feelings of others under due restraint, is 
not the least important of the moral influences, in its 
relation to general happiness. 

There are minds which can delight in exercising this cruel 
sway ; which rejoice in suggesting thoughts that may poison 
the confidence of friends, and render the very virtues that were 
loved, objects of suspicion to him who loved them. In the 
daily and hourly intercourse of human life, there are human 
beings who exert their malicious skill in devising what sub- 
jects may be most likely to bring into the mind of him with 
whom they converse, the most mortifying remembrances; 

M 2 



250 



OF ABSTAINING FROM INJURING 



who pay visits of condolence that tbey may be sure of 
making grief a little more severely felt ; who are faithful 
in conveying to every one the whispers of unmerited 
scandal, of which, otherwise, he never would have heard, 
as he never could have suspected them ; though, in 
exercising this friendly office, they are careful to express 
sufficient indignation against the slanderer, and to bring 
forward as many grounds of suspicion against different 
individuals as their fancy can call up ; who talk to some 
disappointed beauty of all the splendid preparations for the 
marriage of her rival ; to the unfortunate dramatic poet, of 
the success of the last night's piece, and of the great 
improvement which has taken place in modern taste ; and 
who, if they could have the peculiar good fortune of 
meeting with any one whose father was hanged, would 
probably find no subject so attractive to their eloquence as 
the number of executions that were speedily to take place. 

Such power man may exercise over the feelings of man ; 
and as it is impossible to frame laws which can comprehend 
injuries of this sort, such power man may exercise over 
man with legal impunity. But it is a power of which the 
virtuous man will as little think of availing himself, for 
purposes of cruelty, as if a thousand laws had made it as 
criminal as it is immoral ; a power which he will as little 
think of exercising, because it would require only the 
utterance of a few easy words, as of inflicting a mortal 
blow, because it would require only a single motion of his 
hand. 

The true preservative against this power, is that which 
is the protector of the virtuous from all other injury — their 
own purity of conscience. It is not easy to excite perma- 
nently any unpleasant images in the mind of one who, in 
the retrospect of life, has only virtuous actions or virtuous 
desires to remember — who has w T ished to keep nothing 
secret from the world, but the benefactions that provided 
as carefully for the virtuous shame, as for the very wants 



THE MENTAL TRANQUILLITY OF OTHERS. 251 

of poverty ; and who, therefore, if his whole mind could 
become visible, would be not less, but more beloved. The 
tranquillity of such a mind may indeed be disturbed for a 
moment by the petty malice that would strive to awake in 
it disagreeable remembrances ; but even when it may be 
thus disturbed, there is no painful feeliug so likely to ariss 
in it, as regret for that malice itself which it disdains, 
indeed, but which it cannot disdain without some accom- 
panying pity. 



LECTURE XIV. 

OF OUR POSITIVE DUTIES — OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 

In my last Lecture, I concluded my remarks on the 
order of our general duties, which are negative ouly ; that 
is to say, which consist in abstinence from the different 
sorts of injury which it is in our power, directly or 
indirectly, to occasion to others. 

These we considered under seven heads : as our actions 
may be injurious to others, in their person, in their property, 
in the affection of those whom they love, in their general 
character, in their knowledge or belief, as affected by the 
confidence which they place in the truth of our declarations ; 
in their virtue, as subject to the influence of our intentional 
seductions, or to the unintended influence of our mere 
example ; and lastly, in their peace of mind, which, as 
liable to be disturbed by mortifying reflections, that are in 
most cases easy to be excited, is in some measure under 
our control, from the power which the principle of sugges- 
tion gives us over the trains of thought of others, and 
consequently over the general emotions, pleasing or un- 



OF THE DUTIES OP BENEVOLENCE. 



pleasing, which result from those trains of thought, or form 
a part of them. 

To abstain, howeyer, from every species of injury which 
it is in our power to occasion to others, though it is an 
important part of virtue, is but a part of it. Even in our 
most scrupulous forbearance from all the evil which we 
might produce, if this abstinence, however complete, were 
all, the world would still be only as if we had not been. 
There might be before our very eyes misery, which, though 
not produced by ourselves, was not the less an evil, and 
which a slight effort on our part — a word, a very look 
expressive of a wish, might have been sufficient to remove* 
There might, in like manner, be means of easy happiness 
to individuals or whole families, which required only the 
same simple wishes on our part to convert them into 
happiness itself, but which would be wholly unproductive 
without us ; and yet, if we had no feelings which led us to 
be more than passively and negatively good, the misery 
would remain unrelieved, and the happiness be unproduced 
or unpromoted. 

Nature, then, when she conferred on us, in so many noble 
powers of mind and body, such abundant facilities of 
usefulness, did not leave us destitute of the wishes which 
alone could make these facilities valuable. She has given 
us a benevolence that desires the good of all, and a 
principle of moral feeling, which, when we allow an 
opportunity of being widely beneficial to escape, speaks to 
us with a voice of reproach which it is not easy for us to 
still. By the one we merely desire the happiness of man- 
kind ; by the other we feel that to promote this happiness 
of mankind is a duty. 

It is in this latter aspect that we are at present to con- 
sider our power of being beneficial, as giving occasion to a 
duty, or set of duties, corresponding with the particular 
species of good, which any exertion on our part can occasion 
or further. i 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



253 



So important is this duty of benevolence, that, as I 
formerly mentioned, some very eminent moralists have 
been led to maintain, that whatever is felt by us to be 
virtuous, is felt to deserve that name merely as involving 
Some benevolent desire, — an opinion which is evidently 
founded on a partial view of the phenomena; since the 
experience of every one, if he attend sufficiently to his own 
feelings, without regard to any system, must convince him 
that he has a similar emotion of moral regard, in cases in 
which the thought of personal duty, as in many of the 
noblest efforts of self-command, was all which could have 
been present to the mind of the agent ; or in which, though 
it might be possible to invent some benevolent motive, as 
what might influence the fortitude of the heroic sufferer* 
the moral admiration was at least far more rapid than the 
tardy invention of the benevolence. The doctrine of virtue, 
as consisting in benevolence, false as it is when maintained 
as universal and exclusive, is yet, when considered as 
having the sanction of so many enlightened men, a proof 
at least of the very extensive diffusion of benevolence in 
the modes of conduct which are denominated virtuous. It 
may not, indeed, comprehend all the aspects under which 
man is regarded by us as worthy of our moral approbation^ 
but it comprehends by far the greater number of them, — 
his relations to his fellow men, and to all the creatures that 
live around him, though not the moral relations which bind 
him to the greatest of all beings, nor those which are 
directly worthy of our approbation, as confined to the 
perfection of his own internal character. 

That benevolence, the moral link which connects man 
with man, is in itself virtuous, may indeed appear to some 
very rigid questioners of every feeling, to require proof ; 
but it can appear to require it only to those who deny 
altogether the very moral distinction of virtue and vice, in 
that general scepticism which has been already fully con- 
sidered by us. Of those who allow virtue to be more than 



254 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



a name, there is no one who will refuse to benevolent exer- 
tions the praise of this excellence — no one who can read 
the history of any of those heroes of the moral scene whose 
life has been one continued deed of generosity to mankind, 
without feeling that if there be virtue on earth, there has 
been virtue in that bosom which has suffered much, or 
dared much, that the world might be free from any of the 
ills which disgraced it. The strong lines with which the 
author of " The Botanic Garden " concludes his praise of 
one of the most illustrious of these heroes of benevolence, 
scarcely express more than we truly feel on the contempla- 
tion of such a character. It does seem as if man, when 
he acts as man should act, is a being of some higher order 
than the frail erring creatures among whom we ourselves 
pass a life that, with all its occasional acts of generosity 
and self-command, is still, like theirs, a life of frailty and 
error. 

And now, Philanthropy, thy rays divine 

Dart round the globe, from Zerabla to the line ; 

O'er each dark prison plays the cheering light, 

Like northern lustres o'er the vault of night. 

From realm to realm, with cross or crescent crown'd, 

Where'er mankind and misery are found ; 

O'er burning sands, deep waves, or wilds of snow, 

Thy Howard, journeying, seeks the house of wo. 

Down many a winding step to dungeons dank, 

Where anguish wails aloud, and fetters clank, 

To caves bestrew'd with many a mouldering bone, 

And cells, whose echoes only learn to groan ; 

Where no kind bars a whispering friend disclose, 

No sunbeam enters, and no zephyr blows, 

He treads, unemulous of fame or wealth, 

Profuse of toil, and prodigal of health ; 

With soft assuasive eloquence expands 

Power's rigid heart, and opes his clenching hands ; 

Leads stern-eyed Justice to the dark domains, 

If not to sever, to relax the chains ; 

Or guides awaken'd Mercy through the gloom, 

And shows the prison, sister to the tomb ; 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



255 



Gives to her babes the self-devoted wife, 

To her fond husband liberty and life. 

The spirits of the good who bend from high, 

Wide o'er these earthly scenes, their partial eye, 

When first, array'd in Virtue's purest robe, 

They saw her Howard traversing the globe, 

Mistook a mortal for an angel-guest, 

And ask'd, what seraph foot the earth imprest. 

Onward he moves. Disease and death retire, 

And murmuring demons hate him and admire. 1 

The benevolent spirit, as its object is the happiness of all 
who are capable of feeling happiness, is as universal in its 
efforts as the miseries which are capable of being relieved, 
or the enjoyments which it is possible to extend to a single 
human being, within the reach of its efforts, or almost of 
its wishes. When we speak of benefactions, indeed, we 
think only of one species of good action ; and charity itself, 
so comprehensive in its etymological meaning, is used as if 
it were nearly synonymous with the mere opening of the 
purse. But " it is not money only which the unfortunate 
need ; and they are but sluggards in well-doing," as 
Rousseau strikingly expresses the character of this indolent 
benevolence, " who know to do good only when they have 
a purse in their hand." Consolations, counsels, cares, 
friendship, protection, are so many resources which pity 
leaves us for the assistance of the indigent, even though 
wealth should be wanting. The oppressed often continue 
to be oppressed, merely because they are without an organ 
to render their complaints known to those who have the 
power of succour. It requires sometimes but a word which 
they cannot say, a reason which they know not how to 
state, the opening of a single door of a great man, through 
which they are not permitted to pass, to obtain for them all 
of which they are in need. The intrepid support of a dis- 
interested virtue is, in such cases, able to remove an infinity 
of obstacles, and the eloquence of a single good man in the 
1 Botanic Garden, part ih canto ii. 439-472. 



256 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



cause of the injured can appal tyranny itself in the midst of 
its power. 

If indeed tbere be in the heart those genuine wishes of 
diffusive good which are never long absent from the heart 
of the virtuous, there will not long be wanting occasions of 
exertion. It will not be easy for an eye that has been 
accustomed to the search of objects of generous regard, to 
look around without the discovery of something which may 
be remedied, or something which may be improved ; and in 
relieving some misery, or producing or spreading some 
happiness, the good man will already have effected his 
delightful purpose, before others would even have imagined 
that there was any good to be done. 

It would be a waste of time to attempt to examine, with 
any minuteness of analysis, the various ways in which 
benevolence may be usefully exerted. In considering the 
species of injury that give rise to our duties of a negative 
order, I have in some measure considered our positive 
duties also ; since, to abstain from injuring, and to wish to 
promote the good which we have thus forborne to lessen, 
are in spirit results of the same species of benevolent re- 
gard, and of the same moral principle, that commands us 
to further the happiness which it would be vice, by any 
conduct of ours, to diminish. 

To pass slightly over these objects of social regard, then, 
in the order in which they were before considered, the 
benevolent man will be eager to relieve every form of 
personal suffering. Public institutions arise, by his zeal, 
for receiving the sick, who have no home, or a home which 
it is almost sickness to inhabit, and for restoring them, in 
health, to those active employments of which they would 
otherwise have been incapable. In the humblest ranks of 
life, when no other aid can be given by the generous poor, 
than that which their attendance and sympathy administer, 
this aid they never hesitate to afford. When their own 
toils of the day are over, they often give the hours of a 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE, 



257 



night that is to terminate in a renewed call to their 
fatiguing occupations, — not to the repose which their 
exhausted strength might seem to demand, but to a watch- 
ful anxiety around the bed of some feverish sufferer^ who 
is scarcely sufficiently conscious of what is around him, to 
thank them for their care, and whose look of squalid 
wretchedness seems to be only death begun, and the infec- 
tion of death, to all who gaze upon it. The same bene- 
volence which prompts to the succour of the infirm, prompts 
to the succour also of the indigent. Though charity is not 
mere pecuniary aid, pecuniary aid, when such aid is needed^ 
is still one of the most useful, because one of the most 
extensive in its application, of all the services of charity. 
Nor is it valuable only for the temporary relief which it 
affords to sufferings that could not otherwise be relieved. 
It has a higher and more comprehensive office. It brings, 
together those whose union seems necessary for general 
happiness, and almost for explaining the purposes of 
Heaven in the present system of things. There are every 
where the rich, who have means of comfort which they 
know not how to enjoy, and scarcely how to waste ; and 
every where some who are poor without guilt on their 
part, or at least rather guilty because they are poor, than 
poor because they are guilty. All which seems necessary 
for the comfort of both is, that they should be brought 
together. Benevolence effects this union, It carries the 
rich to the cottage, or to the very hovels of the poor ; it 
allows the poor admission into the palaces of the rich ; and 
both become richer in the only true sense of that word, 
because to both there is an accession of happiness. The 
wealthy obtain the pleasure of doing good, and of knowing 
that there are hearts which bless them ; the indigent obtain 
the relief of urgent necessities, and the pleasure of loving a 
generous benefactor. 

Such are the delightful influences of positive benevolence^ 
in their relation to the personal sufferings and to the 



258 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



pecuniary wants of those who, if they have no property to 
be assailed by injustice, have at least necessities, the dis- 
regard of which is equal in moral delinquency to injustice 
itself. In its relation to the affections of those around, who 
are connected with each other by various ties of regard, 
benevolence is not less powerful as a producer or fosterer 
of good. Wherever there are causes of future jealousy 
among those who love each other at present, it delights in 
dispelling the elements of the cloud, when the cloud itself, 
that has not yet begun to darken, scarcely can be said to 
have arisen. If suspicions have already gathered in the 
breast of any one who thinks, but thinks falsely, that he 
has been injured, it is quick, with all the ready logic of 
kindness, to show that the suspicions are without a cause. 
If it find not suspicion only, but dissension that has burst 
out, in all the violence of mutual acrimony, it appears in 
its divine character of a peace-maker, and, almost by the 
influence of its mere presence, the hatred disappears and 
the love returns ; as if it were as little possible that discord 
should continue where it is, as that the mists and gloom of 
night should not disappear at the mere presence of that sun 
which shines upon them. 

" The virtuous man," it has been beautifully said, " pro- 
ceeds without constraint in the path of his duty. His 
steps are free ; his gait is easy ; he has the graces of virtue. 
He moves along in benevolence, and he sees arising in 
others the benevolence which is in him. Of all our 
virtuous emotions, those of kind regard are the most readily 
imitated. To feel them is to inspire them ; to see them is to 
partake them. Are they in your heart? They are in your 
looks, in your manners, in your discourse. Your presence 
reconciles enemies ; and hatred, which cannot penetrate to 
your heart, cannot even dwell around you." 1 

If benevolence is eager to preserve the affection of those 



! De St. Lambert, CEuvres Philosophiques, tome iii. p* 179. 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



259 



who love each other, it cannot fail to be careful of their 
character, on which so much of affection depends. The 
whispers of insidious slander may come to it as they pass 
— with a secrecy which has nothing in it of real secrecy 
but mere lowness of tone — from voice to voice in eager 
publication ; but if there be no other voice to bear them 
farther, they will cease and perish when it is benevolence 
which has heard. It is not indeed that senseless and in- 
different praiser of all actions, which cannot be said to 
applaud any thing, when it does not know what it is right 
to condemn. Benevolence itself can despise, can hate, can 
raise a voice of terrible indignation, when cruelty has been 
inflicting bodily tortures, or oppression torturing the soul. 
It is love, however, which is the principle of its very 
hatred. It hates the oppressors of those whom it loves, 
and it hates oppression every where, because it loves all 
humankind. 

In loving all humankind, and wishing their happiness, it 
is impossible that the benevolent should not love also the 
diffusion of knowledge and virtue to humankind ; since to 
wish permanent happiness without these, would be almost 
to wish for warmth without heat, or colours without light. 
In my last lecture I considered the motives which lead 
men to desire that the multitude of their fellow men should 
be kept down in a state of intellectual and moral darkness ; 
and the motives which lead to the corruption of individuals, 
— those who have selfish passions to gratify, by the debase- 
ment of some pure and holy principle in some ingenuous 
heart, or at least in some heart not wholly corrupted, that, 
if suffered to remain, would be inconsistent with the selfish 
gratification which they seek. Such motives benevolence 
cannot feel. The objects which it seeks are of a kind 
which it would be wisdom to pursue, and virtue to pursue ; 
and wishing, therefore, the universality of such pursuits, ifc 
cannot fail to wish, in like manner, the universality of the 
knowledge and virtue which would see happiness where it 



260 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



is best to be found ; and would not seek it therefore where 
it is often sought, in misery itself, or in the certain causes 
of misery. It is not easy to imagine a mind that is truly 
desirous of the good of the world, which can sincerely, in 
its very desire of this good, recommend ignorance as a 
purifying principle, essential to the moral civilization of 
man, who, according to this strange system, is a savage 
only because he knows too much. It is not easy to give 
credit to the sincerity of this desire ; because one who is 
desirous of public good, must have felt how often, in his 
own actions, he has injured when he wished to benefit, 
merely from the want of some better light which he has 
since received ; and must have seen, in the history of 
legislation, still more striking proofs of the insufficiency of 
mere virtuous wishes, for the purposes of virtue, when a 
very little truth additional might have convinced the 
planner of much social improvement, that he was ignorantly 
retarding that very improvement which the individual 
interests of society itself would have produced far sooner, 
but for the errring patriotism that laboured to urge it on ; 
and that could not employ its too forcible efforts without 
breaking some of the delicate springs on which the beau- 
tiful mechanism of its seemingly spontaneous progress de- 
pended. He who feels in himself, then, the importance of 
knowledge, even to his more enlightened efforts, to be 
beneficial, cannot patriotically wish its light to be obscured, 
or resist the communication of any additional light to those 
few gleams which, on the greater portion of the surface of 
the earth, even in nations which we term civilized, show 
the multitude how to use their hands, indeed, in offices of 
labour, but scarcely serve to show them more. The virtue 
of mankind, and the general knowledge which invigorates 
that virtue, and renders it more surely useful — these are 
the greatest objects which benevolence can have in view ; 
and a benevolence that professes not to value them, and to 
look only to the quantity of manual labour which the hand 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



261 



can most expeditiously perform, and the bodily comforts 
which that more active labour may purchase, even though 
these objects could be obtained as well without mental 
light as with it, is a benevolence that is almost as little 
worthy of the name, as it can ever hope to be worthy of 
the more useful distinction of beneficent. 

These forms of benevolent desire, in their relation to 
various means of happiness or comfort, lead us naturally to 
the wish of preserving that tranquillity of mind in others, 
the violatiou of which we considered last, in treating, in 
corresponding order, of the negative duties* 

The power which nature has given us over the trains of 
thought and emotions which we may raise more or less 
directly in the minds of others, the benevolent man will 
employ as an instrument of his gracious wishes, not as an 
instrument of cruelty. It will be his care to awake in the 
mind of every one who approaches him, the most delightful 
feelings which he can awake, consistently with the per- 
manent virtue and happiness of him whom he addresses. 
He will not flatter, therefore, and speak of faults as if they 
were excellencies ; for this would be to give a little momen- 
tary pleasure at the expense of the virtuous happiness of 
years. But without flattery he will produce more pleasure 
even for the time, than flattery itself could give. In the 
interest which he seems to feel, he will show that genuine 
sincerity which impresses with irresistible belief, and of 
which the confidence is more gratifying to the virtue, I 
had almost said to the very vanity of man, than the doubt- 
ful praises to which the heart, though it may love to hear 
them, is incapable of yielding itself. 

Benevolence, in this amiable form, of course excludes all 
haughtiness. The great, however elevated, descend, under 
its gentle influence, to meet the happiness and the grateful 
affection of those who are beneath them ; and in descend- 
ing to happiness and gratitude which themselves have pro- 
duced, they do not feel that they are descending. What- 



262 



OF THE DUTIES OP BENEVOLENCE. 



ever be the scene of its efforts or wishes, to do good ia to 
the heart always to rise ; and the height of its elevation is 
therefore always in proportion to the quantity of good 
which it has effected, or which, at least, it has had the 
wish of effecting. 

Politeness, — which is, when ranks are equal, what affa- 
bility is, when the more distinguished mingle with the less 
distinguished — is the natural effect of that benevolence 
which regards always with sympathetic complacency, and 
is fearful of disturbing, even by the slightest momentary 
uneasiness, the serenity of others. A breach of attention in 
any of the common offices of civility, to which the arbitrary 
usages of social life have attached importance, even when 
nothing more is intended, is still a neglect, and neglect is 
itself an insult ; it is the immediate cause of a pain which 
no human being is entitled, where there has been no offence, 
to give to any other human being. Politeness, then, — the 
social virtue that foresees and provides against every un- 
pleasant feeling that may arise in the breasts around, as if 
it were some quicksighted and guardian power, intent only 
on general happiness, — is something far more dignified in 
its nature than the cold courtesies which pass current under 
that name, the mere knowledge of fashionable manners, and 
an exact adherence to them. It is in its most essential 
respects what may be possessed by those who know little of 
the varying vocabul ary and varying usages of the season. 
The knowledge of these is, indeed, necessary to such as 
mingle in the circles which require them ; but they are 
necessary only as the new fashion Gf the coat or splendid 
robe, which leaves him or her who wears it the same human 
being, in every respect, as before ; and are not more a part 
of either, than the ticket of admission, which opens to their 
ready entrance the splendid apartment from which the 
humble are excluded. The true politeness of the heart is 
something which cannot be given by those who minister to 
mere decoration. It is the moral grace of life, if I may 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



263 



venture so to term it — the grace of the mind ; and what 
the world counts graces, are little more than graces of the 
body. 

Such is benevolence in the various forms in which it may 
be instrumental to happiness ; and, in being thus instru- 
mental to the happiness of others, it has truly a source of 
happiness within itself. It may not feel, indeed, all the 
enjoyment which it wishes to diffuse, for its wishes are 
unlimited ; but it feels an enjoyment that is as wide as all 
the happiness which it sees around it, or the still greater 
and wider happiness of which it anticipates the existence. 
The very failure of a benevolent wish only breaks its 
delight, without destroying it ; for when one wish of good 
has failed, it has still other wishes of equal or greater good 
that arise, and occupy and bless it as before. 

In considering the various ways in which benevolence 
may be active, we have seen how extensive it may be as a 
feeling of the heart. If wealth, indeed, were necessary, 
there would be few who could enjoy it, or at least who 
could enjoy it largely. But pecuniary aid, as we have 
seen, is only one of many forms of being useful. To 
correct some error, moral or intellectual — to counsel 
those who are in doubt, and who in such circumstances 
require instruction, as the indigent require alms — even 
though nothing more were in our power to show an 
interest in the welfare of the happy, and a sincere commis- 
seration of those who are in sorrow ; in these, and in innu- 
merable other ways, the benevolent, however scanty may 
be their means of conferring what alone the world calls 
benefactions, are not benevolent only, but beneficent ; as 
truly beneficent, or far more so, as those who squander in 
loose prodigalities to the deserving and the undeserving, 
the sufferers from their own thoughtless dissipation, or the 
sufferers from the injustice or dissipation of others, almost 
as much as they loosely squander on a few hours of their 
own sensual appetites. 



264 



OP THE DUTIES OP BENEVOLENCE. 



Even in pecuniary liberalities, benevolence does not 
merely produce good, but it knows well, or it learns to 
know, the greatest amount of good which its liberalities 
can produce. To be the cause of less happiness or comfort 
than might be diffused at the same cost, is almost a species 
of the same vice which withholds aid from those who re- 
quire it. The benevolent, therefore, are magnificent in their 
bounty, because they are economical even in bounty itself. 
Their heart is quick to perceive sources of relief where 
others do not see them ; and the whole result of happiness 
produced by them, seems often to have arisen from a 
superb munificence which few could command, when it 
may, perhaps, have proceeded only from humble means, 
which the possessor of similar means, without similar bene- 
volence, would think scarcely more than necessary for his 
own strict necessities. How beautifully, in Pope's well- 
known description of an individual, whose simple charities 
have made him as illustrious as the most costly profusion 
of charity in other circumstances could have done, is this 
quick tendency to minister to every little comfort marked, 
In the provision which he is represented as making, not for 
gross and obvious miseries only, but for the very ease of 
the traveller or common passenger. 

But all our praises why should lords engross ! 
Rise, honest muse, and sing the Man of Ross ! 
Pleased Vaga echoes through her winding bounds, 
And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds. 
Who hung with woods yon mountain's sultry brow ? 
From the dry rock who bade the waters flow I 
Not to the skies in useless columns tost, 
Or in proud falls magnificently lost, 
But clear and artless, pouring through the plain 
Health to the sick and solace to the swain. 
Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows ? 
Whose seats the weary traveller repose % 
Who taught that heaven- directed spire to rise ! 
The Man of Ross, each lisping babe replies. 
Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread ! 



OF THE DUTIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 



265 



The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread. 
He feeds yon almshouse, neat, but void of state, 
Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate. 
Him portion'd maids, apprenticed orphans blest, 
The young who labour, and the old who rest. 
Is any sick ? the Man of Ross relieves, 
Prescribes, attends, the medicine makes and gives. 
Is there a variance ? enter but his door, 
Balk'd are the courts, and contest is no more. 1 

What is it which makes this picture of benevolence so 
peculiarly pleasing ? It is not the mere quantity of hap- 
piness produced, even when taken in connexion with the 
seemingly disproportionate income, the few hundred pounds 
a-year which were so nobly devoted to the production of 
that happiness. It is pleasing, chiefly from the air of 
beautiful consistency that appears in so wide a variety of 
good, the evidence of a genuine kindness of heart, that was 
quick, as I have said, to perceive, not the great evils only 
which force themselves upon every eye, but the little comforts 
also which might be ministered to those, of whom the rich, 
even when they are disposed to extend to them the indolent 
succour of their alms, and sometimes, too, the more 
generous succour of their personal aid, are yet accustomed 
to think only as sufferers who are to be kept alive, rather 
than as human beings who are to be made happy. We 
admire, indeed, the active services with which the Man of 
Ross distributed the weekly bread, built houses that were 
to be homes of repose for the aged and indigent, visited the 
sick, and settled amicably the controversies of neighbours 
and friends, who might otherwise have become foes in 
becoming litigants ; but it is when, together with these 
prominent acts of obvious beneficence, we consider the acts 
of attention to humbler, though less obvious wants, that 
we feel, with lively delight and confidence, the kindness 
of a heart which, in its charitable meditations, could think 
of happiness as well as of misery, and foresee means of 
1 Moral Essays, Epistle iii. 249-272. 

N 



266 OF THE POSITIVE DUTIES WHICH WE OWE 



happiness, which the benevolent, indeed, can easily produce, 
but which are visible only to the benevolent. It is by 
its inattention to the little wants of man, that ostentation 
distinguishes itself from charity ; and a sagacious observer 
needs no other test, in the silent disdain or eager reverence 
of his heart, to separate the seeming benevolence, which 
seeks the applauding voices of crowds, from the real 
benevolence, which seeks only to be the spreader of 
happiness or consolation. It is impossible for the most 
ostentatious producer of the widest amount of good, with 
all his largesses, and with all his hypocrisy, to be consistent 
in his acts of seeming kindness ; because, to be consistent, 
he must have that real kindness which sees what the cold 
simulator of benevolence is incapable of seeing, and does, 
therefore, what such a cold dissembler is incapable even of 
imagining. 



LECTURE XV. 

OF THE POSITIVE DUTIES WHICH WE OWE TO CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS 
ONLY — ARISING FROM AFFINITY, FRIENDSHIP, BENEFITS RECEIVED, 
CONTRACT. 

In my last Lecture I concluded the remarks which I had 
to offer on the duties, negative and positive, which we owe 
to all the individuals of mankind ; on the species of injury 
from which we are under a moral obligation to abstain, 
whoever he may be whom it is in our power to injure ; and 
on the good which we are under a similar obligation to 
produce to every one who comes within the sphere of our 
usefulness. 

After the consideration of these general duties, then, I 
proceed to the class of additional duties which we owe to 



TO CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS ONLY. 



267 



certain individuals only, with whom we are connected by 
peculiar ties. 

These may be considered by us under five heads ; as the 
duties which arise from affinity, from friendship, from 
benefits received, from contract, from citizenship. The 
duties of this class, as I have said, are additional duties*, 
not duties exclusive of any of the former. We owe to our 
relations, to our friends, to our benefactors, to those with 
whom we have entered into engagements of any sort, to 
our fellow-citizens, all which we owe to others who are 
connected with us only as human beings ; but we owe 
them more ; and it is this accession of duty which we have 
now to consider. 

If the only moral offices, of which we had been formed 
by nature to feel the obligation, were those which connect 
us alike with every individual of our race, whose happiness 
we should, in that case, as now, have felt it to be our duty 
to augment when it was in our power to augment it, and 
when there was no opportunity of this accession, at least 
not to lessen its amount, it might perhaps seem to the 
unreflecting, that a provision as ample would have been 
made for the happiness of the world, as that which is now 
so abundantly made for it, under the reciprocal kindness of 
a system of relative duties that vary in force as the peculiar 
relation is nearer or more remote, but, in all, add to the 
general feelings of humanity some new influence of benevo- 
lent regard. There have, indeed, even in our own time, 
been philosophers or moral writers that assume the name, 
who have contended for this equal diffusion of duty, or at 
least for a gradation of duty that varies only with the 
absolute merits of the individual, independently of all 
particular relationship to the agent, — asserting, in conse- 
quence, that every preference to which the private affections 
lead, is vicious on this very account, as being inconsistent 
with that exact conformity to the scale of absolute merit, 
in which alone they conceive virtue to consist. It is right, 



268 OF THE POSITIVE DUTIES WHICH WE OWE 



indeed, 011 some occasions, according to this system, to do 
good to a parent or a benefactor, or rather, it is not absolutely 
impossible that a case should occur, in which it may not 
be guilt to do good to a parent or a benefactor ; but it is 
only in rare cases that the choice implied in the singling 
out of such an object, is proper or allowable, in those rare 
cases, in which it would have been right to prefer to every 
other individual of mankind, the same individual, though 
unconnected with us by any tie but our knowledge of his 
virtues ; and when he, with whom we consider ourselves 
as peculiarly connected, by the mere accident of our birth, 
or of kindnesses conferred on us, is not the individual whom, 
in other circumstances, it would have been, in like manner, 
our duty thus to prefer, it does not become more our duty, 
on account of these accidental circumstances. Far from 
being virtuous, therefore, in bestowing on him any limited 
good which it is in our power to bestow only on one, we 
are guilty, with no slight degree of delinquency, in the 
very action which we may strive to cover with the seem- 
ingly honourable name of gratitude or filial duty. These 
names, indeed, are honourable only in sound or semblance ; 
for, to those who are capable of appreciating them ethically, 
they are as void of moral meaning, as the words tall or 
short, fat or thin ; which, in like manner, express qualities 
of human beings, whom it may be right to prefer, or wrong 
to prefer, but not the more right, nor the more wrong, to 
prefer them on account of any of these physical qualities 
to those who may be of greater merit, though fatter or 
thinner, taller cr shorter. 

The errors of this system of sole universal duty I have 
already endeavoured to point out to you, when I explained 
the importance to happiness, of all the private affections ; — 
the great accession to the general good which is every 
moment flowing from the indulgence of a regard that, in 
thinkiug with a more lively interest of the individual loved 
than it would be possible to think of a community, is then, 



TO CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS ONLY. 



269 



perhaps, the most effective contributor to the happiness of 
mankind, when the happiness of mankind is most forgotten 
by it, in the happiness of one or of a few of the number. 
The human race, as distinguishable from families and 
individuals, is but a mere abstraction, and expresses truly 
nothing more than the very individuals who are thus at 
every moment gratifying and gratified. What produces the 
greatest amount of good to all, in the enjoyment of the 
private affections, is not that which we can readily suppose 
the framer of a world that is blessed by this very produc- 
tion, to have formed every individual to regard as vice ; 
and to regard as virtue only the disregard of that with 
which the world would be more happy. We find, accord- 
ingly, the universal feelings of mankind accordant with the 
system of particular duties, that is so largely productive of 
happiness. In every region of the earth, and in all circum- 
stances of society, the indulgence of the private affections 
is considered not as allowable merely, but as obligatory, so 
obligatory on all, that the guilt which would produce every 
where the most general abhorrence, would be, not the 
forgetfulness of the good of the world, — for of this the 
thousands that live around us, in the continued exercise of 
many virtues, seldom if ever think, — but the violation of 
some one of these private duties, the injury done to a friend, 
a benefactor, a parent, or even without positive injury, the 
mere neglect of them, in circumstances of want or of 
suffering of any kind, which our bounty, or exertions of 
active aid, could relieve. 

We are to prefer to the happiness of our parent or 
benefactor, it is said, the happiness of a stranger, who, 
without any particular relation to us, is a degree or two 
higher in the scale of absolute merit. But why are we to 
seek his happiness, and why is it immoral to disregard it ? 
In this system, as in every other system of vice and virtue, 
there must be some source of the distinctive feelings. It is 
to our moral emotions, as they rise on the contemplation of 



270 OF THE POSITIVE DUTIES WHICH WE OWE 



certain actions, that the theorist must look ; or, if he 
disregard these, he must allow that vice and virtue are 
words without a meaning ; and if virtue and vice have 
their sole origin in these moral emotions, is there an 
observer of our nature who can have the boldness to 
maintain, that, in relation to these feelings, in which all 
that is morally obligatory is to be found, gratitude to a 
benefactor is a vice, and the disregard of the sufferings of a 
parent a virtue, whenever, without the power of relieving 
both, we see before us, at the same time, a suffering 
stranger, who is capable of doing a little more good to the 
world ? 

The very feeling of duty, then, has its source, and its only 
source, in the very moral emotions by which the private 
affections are particularly recommended to us. To exclude, 
therefore, from a system of duty, the exercise of the private 
affections in those preferences which are only the private 
affections becoming active, and, in excluding these, to 
maintain at the same time that there is a system of duty, a 
virtue in certain preferences, a vice in certain other pre- 
ferences, is to be guilty of inconsistency, far more illogical 
than the licentiousness which denies all virtue and vice 
whatever. To prove that there is some truth in moral 
obligation, this universalist, as we have seen, must neces- 
sarily appeal to those moral feelings of which we are 
conscious, without which it would be vain for him to speak 
of moral distinction of any sort. For his sole proof, then, 
of the virtue of disregarding wholly every personal relation- 
ship and affection, he appeals to feelings that, if they 
establish any obligation whatever, establish none so firmly 
as that of the private relative duties, which they are every 
moment sanctioning and approving ; and his system, there- 
fore, if we trace its principles to their source, in the 
approving and disapproving principle within us, is precisely 
the same in import, as if its radical doctrine were, that it is 
right 'for us to do certain actions, because it is wrong for us 



TO CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS ONLY. 



271 



to do them, or wrong for us to do certain other actions, 
because to do them would be right. 

It is surely, I repeat, by a very strange paralogism, that 
he would found an assertion of an exclusive universal duty 
on the moral feelings of our heart, which alone enable us to 
distinguish what is virtuous from what is vicious, and 
would yet contend that these very feelings of our heart, 
which are rising at every moment in the very conception of 
our parents, our friends, our country, are at every moment 
to be disregarded. But, even though this radical objection 
were omitted, and though we were to concede to the 
universalist, that the private affections are not recom- 
mended to us, by nature, on their own account; that to 
our moral feelings, the equal sufferings of our benefactor, 
and of a stranger of equal general merit, are exactly of the 
same interest ; and that all which is truly an object of 
interest to us, is the amount of public happiness of the great 
community of mankind ; still, if we regard the general 
happiness, are not the means of the greatest amount of 
general happiness to be valued at least as means ? And if 
the indulgence of the private affections tend, upon the 
whole, to a greater amount of good, is not our calculating 
virtue, which should prefer always what is to contribute 
most largely to the great sum of happiness, to rank as 
virtuous what is so extensively beneficial? 

In treating of our emotions of love, as they vary in 
relation to their different objects, I endeavoured to exhibit 
to you that beautiful arrangement, with which, in all these 
varieties, Heaven has adapted the vividness of our affections 
to our power of being beneficial ; the love being most 
lively in those moral connexions, in which the opportunities 
of usefulness are most frequent, and capable of being most 
accurately applied, in relation to the peculiar wants of him 
who is to be benefited. The scale of duty, which corres- 
ponds with this scale of affection, and of probable usefulness, 
the ethical destroyers of private affection of course exclude. 



272 OF THE POSITIVE DUTIES WHICH WE OWE 



We are not to think more of those whom it is in our power, 
almost at every instant, to make happier than they were, 
than of those who are at the remotest distance from our 
sphere of usefulness. We are to view them according to 
their individual merits, as human beings only; the parent 
as the stranger, the stranger as the parent ; and, when we 
strive thus to view them with equal affection, it is not 
difficult to discover which metamorphosis of feeling will be 
the more probable, in this one equalized emotion. It will 
be impossible for us to look on a stranger with the emotions 
of vivid regard, of which -we are conscious, as often as we 
think of those from whom we derived existence, and what- 
ever has made existence a gift of value. It is far from 
impossible, however, that, by frequently considering these 
earliest benefactors, as possessing no higher moral claim to 
our regard and good offices, than those who stand in the 
same relationship to any other person, we may learn, at 
least, to make an approximation to this indifference ; and 
to regard a parent with the affection which we now feel for 
a stranger, more nearly than we regard a stranger with the 
affection which we now feel for a parent. 

In the wide communion of the social world, each indi- 
vidual is, as it were, the centre of many circles. Near 
him, are those from whom he has derived most happiness, 
and to whom, reciprocally, it is in his power to diffuse 
most happiness, in continual interchange of kindness. In 
the circle beyond, are they who have had less opportunity 
of such mutual benefits than those who are nearer, but more 
than the widening number in the circles that progressively 
enlarge, as the distance from the centre increases, and 
enlarge in expansion and distance, with a corresponding 
inverse diminution of benefits conferred, and of the capa- 
city of being benefited. It would have been a system of 
very different adaptation for the production of happiness, 
if the scale of regard had been reversed ; so that our bene- 
volent wishes had been more and more vivid, in opposite 



TO CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS ONLY. 273 

progression, for those whom it was less and less in our 
power to serve. In such a case it is very evident, that the 
general amount of happiness would have been reduced in 
two ways, by the omission of many opportunities of doing 
good to those immediately around us, of which, with livelier 
affection, we should not have failed to avail ourselves ; and 
still more by the painful wish of relief to sufferers at a 
distance, to whose miseries this very distance deprived us 
of all power of contributing even the slightest means of 
alleviation. The evil of such a reversal of the present scale 
of affection and duty, is scarcely more than the evil that 
would arise to the world, from the equalization of regard 
in the system of universal duty, that excludes from its 
moral estimate every private affection. I do not speak at 
present of the impossibility of such a system, as incon- 
sistent with some of the strongest principles of our nature. 
I proceed on the supposition of its possibility, and consider 
its influence on the happiness of the world, in comparison 
with the system on which we at present act. If we are to 
regard mankind only according to their individual excel- 
lence, as members of one great society, and to sacrifice, 
therefore, all private feelings to one great public feeling 
that has this society of mankind for its object, the equal 
diffusion of our love to all, whose absolute merit is precisely 
the same, must, if produced at all, be produced in one of 
two ways ; either by increasing, in a very high degree, the 
liveliness of our regard for those who are strangers to us, 
at a distance, or by lessening, in an equal degree, the live- 
liness of our regard for those who surround us in our imme- 
diate neighbourhood, and under the very shelter of our 
domestic roof. If the equality be produced by levelling 
these kinder feelings, so that, when an opportunity of doing 
good occurs to us, we think not of those who are beside us, 
and who may be speedily profited by it, but of some one at 
a greater distance, whom our action, if deferred, may never 
profit ; if, with a constant moral fear of erring in the allot- 

n2 



274 OF THE POSITIVE DUTIES WHICH WE OWE 



ment of our expressions of benevolence, we look coldly on 
every one, on whom our eye is every moment falling in the 
domestic intercourse of the day, and reserve our courtesies, 
our smiles, our very tones of kindness, for some one of 
greater absolute merit, whom we expect to see before the 
day is closed, or whom we have at least a chance of seeing 
before we quit the world, it is evident that far more than 
half of the happiness of every day would be destroyed to 
every bosom, by this calculating appreciation of kindness. 
It is not a mere faint desire of good to any one, that is 
quick to find the good which it desires. It is the lively 
benevolence that sees, in almost every thing, some relation 
to the happiness of the object loved ; because the happiness 
of the object loved is constantly in the mind of him who 
feels that liveliness of benevolence. Opportunities of pro- 
ducing good, therefore, are never wanting to him who is 
strongly desirous of producing it ; and to lessen the liveli- 
ness of our kind wishes for those who are around us, would, 
therefore, be to render ineffective a thousand occasions of 
enjoyment or relief. 

Such would be the evil of reducing the force of the pecu- 
liar interest which we feel, in the happiness of our relations, 
of our friends, of all who are connected with us by any of 
the closer bonds of social union. But the evil that could 
not fail to arise in this way, would be slight, compared 
with that which would arise, in the other circumstances 
supposed, if our affection for the most distant stranger were 
raised, so as to correspond in intensity with the liveliness 
of our feeling for those immediately around us. If it be 
our duty to wish in as lively a manner the happiness of the 
natives of some African tribe as of our friend or our father, 
we must either feel very little interest in the happiness of 
our friend or our father, or we must have a strong wish of 
benefiting that tribe of Africans, which, as such a wish 
must be wholly ineffectual on the part of the greater 
number of mankind, cannot fail to be a source of continued 



TO CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS ONLY. 



275 



uneasiness. This would be the case, even though we were 
to think only of accessions to happiness, without taking 
into account the absolute misery of those in whose evils of 
every sort we are to sympathize, with all the quickness of 
commiseration, which transfers instantly to our own bosom 
a share of every evil that is suffered by those whom we 
love. Let us imagine a single individual, who, in accor- 
dance with such a system, feels for every wretchedness of 
every victim of disease, or captivity, or want, in every 
nation of the globe, a thousandth part of the agony which 
he would feel, if that victim were his parent, or his dearest 
friend \ and let us then think, what the state of man would 
be, if all the sympathies of his nature had been thus 
arranged, in adaptation to a system of duties that excluded 
every local and accidental influence, and estimated human 
beings only as human beings. It would, indeed, be no 
slight evil, if we could learn to look with total disregard 
on the sorrows of others. But while there was misery in 
the world, if the misery of all individuals of all nations 
were to be equally felt by us, or not felt by us at all, an 
universal indifference would probably be less destructive 
to general happiness, than the anguish of sharing so many 
miseries at the distance perhaps of half the earth, which it 
would be almost as vain for us to think of relieving, as of 
relieving the sufferings of the inhabitants of another planet. 
In proportioning our duties with our affections, to our 
facilities of affording aid to the miserable, and of affording 
happiness to the few whom it is most easy to render happy, 
nature has consulted best for general happiness ; all are 
every where most active in administering relief or enjoy- 
ment, where activity may be most useful ; and the beauti- 
ful result of the moral excellence of a state is thus produced 
in the same way as the political wealth and power of a 
state are produced, by innumerable little efforts, that indi- 
vidually increase the general amount, which is, at the 
time, no object of conception, but which, as it rises at last 



276 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



from the efforts of all, attracts the admiration of those who 
unconsciously contributed to it, and who, in admiring it 
when it has risen, are scarcely aware that the efforts which 
raised it were their own. To hope to produce greater 
virtue and happiness, by the exclusion of every particular 
duty, is in truth a speculation as wild, as it would be to 
hope to augment the political resources of an empire, by 
urging individuals to regard not their own profit in any 
case, but the profit of their thousand competitors, in the 
equal market of industry. 

It is not evil, then, for man upon the whole, that, in wish- 
ing the happiness of all mankind, he should wish, in an 
especial manner, the happiness of those who are connected 
with him by peculiar ties,— by those ties of additional duty 
which I have already enumerated. To the first of these I 
now proceed. 

Of the ties of relationship, and the duties of which that 
relationship is the source, we may consider, in the first 
place, those under which man enters into life, — the ties 
which bind together with reciprocal duties the parent and 
the child. 

If we consider merely the powers of the individual, in 
relation to the evils to which he is exposed, man is born the 
most helpless of all created things. But if we consider the 
affection that exists in the bosoms to which he is for the 
first time pressed ; the moral principle which, in those 
bosoms, would render the neglect of his wants one of the 
most atrocious of crimes ; and the eager tendency to 
anticipate, with the necessary relief, the slightest expression 
of these wants, — a tendency which is instant of itself, and 
which requires no moral principle to call it into action, — 
man, we may truly say, is born as powerful as he is to be 
in -years, when his own wisdom and the vigour of his own 
arm are to be to him what he may count a surer protection. 
He may afterwards speak with a voice of command to those 
whose tervices he has purchased, and who obey him, 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



277 



because, iu the barter which they have made of their 
services, it is their trade to obey ; but he cannot, even then, 
by the most imperious orders which he addresses to the 
most obsequious slaves, exercise an authority more com- 
manding than that which, in the first hours of his life, 
when a few indistinct cries and tears were his only lauguage, 
he exercised irresistibly over hearts, of the very existence 
of which he was ignorant. 

This feeling of regard is so strong in every breast, and 
so simple in its relation to the mere sustenance and 
protection of the little object of so many cares, that it 
would be a waste of time to treat of the primary obligation 
under which the parents lie, to save from perishing that 
human creature to which they have given existence, and 
which could not fail to perish, but for the aid which it is in 
their power to give to it. It is only with respect to the 
more complicated duties of the relation, in maturer years, 
that any difficulty can be felt. 

These duties relate to the education of the child, to the 
provision which is made for his mere worldly accommoda- 
tion, and to the expression of that internal love which 
should accompany all these cares, and without which it 
would be impossible to feel them as acts of kindness. 

That such an education is to be given in every case, as 
is suitable to the pecuniary circumstances of the parents, 
and to the rank which the child may be expected after- 
wards to fill, there is probably no one who would deny, 
however much individuals may differ as to the meaning of 
the term education. In the lowest ranks of life, at least 
in far the greater part even of civilized Europe, it means 
nothing more than the training of the hands to a certain 
species of motion, which forms one of the subdivisions of 
mechanical industry. In the higher ranks, it implies, in 
like manner, a certain training of the limbs to series of 
motions, which are however not motions of mere utility, 
like those of the artisan, but of grace ; and, in addition to 



278 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



those bodily movements, a training of the mind to a due 
command of certain graceful forms of expression, to which, 
in a few happier cases, is added the knowledge, more or 
less extensive and accurate, of the most striking truths of 
science. When all this is performed, education is thought 
to be complete. To express this completion by the 
strongest possible word, the individual is said to be 
accomplished ; and if graceful motions of the limbs, and 
motions of the tongue, in well-turned phrases of courteous 
elegance, and a knowledge of some of the brilliant expressions 
of poets, and wits, and orators, of different countries, and 
of a certain number of the qualities of the masses or atoms 
which surround him, were sufficient to render man what 
God intended him to be, the parent who had taken every 
necessary care for adorning his child with these bodily and 
mental graces, might truly exult in the consciousness that 
he had done his part to the generation which was to 
succeed, by accomplishing at least one individual for the 
noble duties which he had to perform in it. But, if the 
duties which man has to perform, whatever ornament they 
may receive from the corporeal and intellectual graces that 
may flow around them, imply the operation of principles 
of action of a very different kind ; if it is in the heart that 
we are to seek the source of the feelings which are our 
noblest distinction,— with which we are what even God 
may almost approve, and without which we are worthy of 
the condemnation even of beings frail and guilty as our- 
selves ; and if the heart require to be protected from vice, 
with far more care than the understanding itself, fallible as 
it is, to be protected from error, can he indeed lay claim to 
the praise of having discharged the parental office of 
education, who has left the heart to its own passions, 
while he has contented himself with furnishing to those 
passions the means of being more extensively baneful to 
the world than, with less accomplished selfishness, they 
could have been ? 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



279 



How many parents do we see, who, after teaching their 
sons by example every thing which is licentious in manners, 
and lavishing on them the means of similar licentiousness, 
are rigid only in one point — in the strictness of that 
intellectual discipline which may prepare them for the 
worldly stations to which the parental ambition has been 
unceasingly looking for them, before the filial ambition 
was rendered sufficiently intent of itself! — how many, who 
allow to the vices of the day full liberty, if the lesson of 
the day be duly meditated ; and who are content that those 
whose education they direct should be knaves and sensual- 
ists, if only they be fitted by intellectual culture to be the 
leaders of other knaves, and the acquirers of wealth that 
may render their sensuality more delicately luxurious ! To 
such persons, the mind of the little creature whom they are 
training to worldly stations for worldly purposes, is an 
object of interest only as that without which it would be 
impossible to arrive at the dignities expected. It is a 
necessary instrument for becoming rich and powerful ; and 
if he could become powerful, and rich, and envied, without 
a soul, — exhibit the same spectacle of magnificent luxury, 
and be capable of adding to the means of present pomp, 
what might furnish out a luxury still more magnificent, 
they would scarcely feel that he was a being less noble 
than now. In what they term education, they have never 
once thought that the virtues were to be included as objects ; 
and they would truly feel something very like astonishment 
if they were told that the first and most essential part of 
the process of educating the moral being whom Heaven 
had consigned to their charge, was yet to be begun, in the 
abandonment of their own vices, and the purification of 
their own heart by better feelings than those which had 
corrupted it ; without which primary self-amendment, the 
very authority that is implied in the noble office which 
they were to exercise, might be a source not of good but of 
evil to him who was unfortunately born to be its subject. 



280 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



Corrumpunt vitiorum exempla domestica, magnis 
Cum subeunt animos auctoribus. Unus et alter 
Forsitan haec spernant juvenes, quibus arte benigna, 
Et meliore luto, finxit praecordia Titan : 
Sed reliquos fugienda patrum vestigia ducunt, 
Et monstrata diu veteris trahit orbita culpae. 
Abstineas igitur damnandis; hujus enim vel 
Una potens ratio est, ne crimina nostra sequantur 
Ex nobis geniti; quoniam dociles imitandis 
Turpidis ac pravis omnes sumus, et Catilinam 
Quocunque in populo videas, quocunque sub axe; 
Sed nec Brutus erit, Bruti nec avunculus usquam. 
Maxima debetur puero reverentia : si quid 
Turpe paras, ne tu pueri contempseris annos, 
Sed peccaturo obstet tibi filius infans. 1 

Though the enjoyments of this world, which so many 
seek as all, were truly all, and we ceased to exist when our 
mortal existence terminated, it would still be the duty of 
the parent to consult the happiness of the child, more than 
those circumstances of accidental happiness which may 
sometimes lead to it, but often, perhaps as often, are 
productive of misery ; and, even of the short happiness of 
this short life, how large is the part which we have to 
ascribe to our virtuous affections, or rather, how very little 
is there of pure happiness which we can ascribe to any 
other source. But when we think how small a portion of 
our immortal existence is comprised in this earthly life ; 
when, amid sensual pleasures that fade almost in the 
moment in which they are enjoyed, and wealth and dignities 
that are known more in their rapid changes, as passing 
from possessor to possessor, than as truly possessed by any 
one of the multitude, who, in their turns, obtain and lose 
them, we feel that, amid so many perishable and perishing 
things, virtue, the source of all which it is delightful to 
remember, is the only permanent acquisition which can be 
ma^e, — how completely must he seem to have neglected 



1 Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 32-49. 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



281 



the duty of a parent, who has thought only of a few years 
that are as nothing, and neglected that immortality 
which is all. If we had a long voyage to undertake, it 
would be but a cruel kindness that should pour forth its 
bounty on a single day, and provide for us only one repast, 
however costly. It is surely a kindness not less cruel 
which, in the common offices of education, thinks but of a 
single day, and makes provision only for its comfort in that 
endless course, not of years, but of ages, on which we enter 
in entering into life. 

In giving to society another individual, we owe to it 
every care, on our part, that the individual, thus given to 
it, may not be one whose existence may be counted by 
society among the evils that have oppressed it. 

Gratum est, quod patriae civem, populoque dedisti, 
Si facis, ut patriae sit idoneus. 1 

Nor is it only to the country to which we give a new 
citizen, that our gift is to be estimated, as a blessing or an 
injury, according to the nature of the living offering that is 
presented to it. To that very citizen himself the gift of 
existence is the greatest of all blessings, or the greatest of 
all injuries, only as his character is to be virtuous or 
vicious ; aud whether the character is to be virtuous or 
vicious, may often depend on circumstances which were 
almost at the disposal of him by whom the doubtful gift of 
mere existence was bestowed. " It is not a blessing," says 
an ancient philosopher, "to live merely, but to live well. 
Life in itself, if life without wisdom be a good, is a good 
that is common to me with the meanest reptiles ; and he 
who gave me nothing more than life, gave me only what a 
fly or a worm may boast. If, in the love and hope of 
virtue, I have employed that life which my parents con- 
ferred on me, in studies that were to render me more 



1 Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 70. 



282 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



noble in the sight of Heaven, I have paid back to them more 
than I have received. My father gave me to myself rude 
and ignorant ; I have given him a son, of whom it may 
delight him to be the father." " Xon est bonum vivere, 
sed bene vivere. Si vitam imputas mihi, per se. nudam, 
egentem consilii, et id nt magnum bonum jactas, cogita te 
mihi imputare muscarum ac vermium bonum. Deinde, ut 
nihil aliud dicain, quam bonis artibus me studuisse, ut 
cursum ad rectum iter vitae dirigerim ; in ipso beneficio 
tuo majus quam quod dederas, recepisti. Tu enim me mihi 
rudem et imperitum dedisti : ego tibi filium, qualem genuisse 
gauderes." 1 

The neglect of parental duty, in the comparative 
inatteution to the moral discipline of the mind, may 
indeed be considered only as a continuation to the offspring 
of the errors which influence the parent in conduct that 
relates wholly to himself. He seeks for them what he 
seeks for himself; and as he is ambitious to be rich or 
powerful, rather than happy, he wishes to enable them, in 
like manner, to be rich or powerful, and leaves their happi- 
ness, as he has left his own, to be the casual result of 
circumstances that may or may not produce it. 

The importance attached by parents to the mere tempo- 
rary circumstances of earthly splendour, which leads to one 
most fatal species of violation of parental duty in the sort 
of culture which they are most anxious to bestow, aggra- 
vates, in a very high degree, the second species of violation 
of it to which I alluded in enumerating the parental duties, 
that which consists in inadequate provision of those very 
means to which they attach so much importance. I do not 
speak at present of the extreme prodigality of those who 
think only of themselves, and who scarcely think even of 
themselves beyond an hour ; the prodigality which leaves 
in indigence those who have been brought up in habits of 



Seneca de Beueficiis, lib. iii. cap. xxxi. 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



283 



luxury, that have rendered luxury, like that of their 
extravagant parents, almost an object of necessity to them. 
I allude to the intentional deliberate sacrifice which is 
made of the comforts of many children to the wealth of 
one, — a sacrifice which has usually, or at least often, 
tended only to make one less virtuous than he would have 
been, and many less happy. The national consequences of 
the privileges of primogeniture and of sex, belong to 
inquiries in political jurisprudence. At present, it is not 
of these that I speak. It is only of the wants of the 
children, and the affection and duty of the parent. These 
wants are obviously equal in all ; and if the merits of all 
be equal, the affection of the parent should be the same, 
and his duty equal to all who, with equal wants and equal 
merits, are consigned to his equal love. It is vain now to 
look for a justification of breaches of this equal duty, to 
periods of violence, in which it was necessary, for the 
happiness of all, that inequality of distribution should take 
place, that there might be one sufficiently powerful to 
protect the scantier pittance of the many. These circum- 
stances of violence are now no more subsisting in the regular 
polities of Europe. The affections are allowed without 
peril to exercise themselves freely. The father of many 
virtuous children may safely be to all what he is to one ; 
and if he lay aside this equal character, and, sheltering 
himself in the forced manners of barbarous and tumultuous 
ages, make many poor that he may make one rich, is 
guilty of a gross violation of his duties as a parent; and 
the more guilty, in exact proportion to the value which he 
attaches to the possession of the wealth so unequally 
distributed. Nor is it only to those whom he directly wills 
to impoverish, that he is guilty of a breach of duty ; he is 
equally guilty of it, in many cases, to the single individual 
whom he exclusively enriches, if, in estimating what he 
confers, we consider the virtue and happiness, or vice 
and misery, that may arise from it, and not the mere 



284 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



wealth, which in itself is nothing. The superiority which 
is thus bestowed on a single individual, is a superiority that 
may, indeed, like every possession of power, lead to the 
exercise of corresponding virtues ; to the generous mind it 
may present, as it has often presented, only wider occasions 
of generosity ; yet beautiful as such examples may be, it 
is not what the general circumstances of our nature autho- 
rize us to expect ; and the power of being thus generous, 
when, without that dubious generosity, those who have 
been made dependent on it may suffer what perhaps it 
was not intended that they should suffer, is a power of too 
great peril to human virtue to be rashly imposed upon 
human weakness. 

Such are two of the great duties of parents ; those which 
relate to provision for the mental culture, and temporal 
accommodation of their offspring. I have mentioned, as a 
third duty, that of tempering the parental authority with 
all the kindness of parental love, which, even in exacting 
obedience only where obedience is necessary for the good of 
him who obeys, is still the exacter of sacrifices which 
require to be sweetened by the kindness that demands them. 
This duty, indeed, may be considered as in some degree 
involved in the general duty of moral education ; since it 
is not a slight part of that duty to train the mind of the 
child to those affections which suit the filial nature, and 
which are the chief element of every other affection that 
adorns in after life the friend, the citizen, the lover of 
mankind. The father who has no voice but that of stern 
command, is a tyrant to all the extent of his power, and 
will excite only such feelings as tyrants excite ; a ready 
obedience, perhaps, but an obedience that is the trembling 
haste of a slave, not the still quicker fondness of an ever 
ready love ; and that will be withheld in the very instant 
in which the . terror has lost its dominion. It is impossible to 
have, in a single individual, both a slave and a son ; and 
he who chooses rather to have a slave, must not expect that 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



285 



filial fondness which is no part of the moral nature of a 
bondman. In thinking that he increases his authority, he 
truly diminishes it ; for more than half the authority of the 
parent is in the love which he excites, in that zeal to obey 
which is scarcely felt as obedience when a wish is expressed, 
and in that ready imitation of the \irtues that are loved, 
which does not require even the expression of a wish, but 
without a command becomes all which a virtuous parent 
could have commanded. 



LECTURE XVI. 

OF THE DUTIES OF AFFINITY — PARENTAL DUTIES ; FILIAL DUTIES ; 
FRATERNAL DUTIES ; CONJUGAL DUTIES. 

In my last Lecture I arranged the duties which we owe 
to particular individuals, under five heads : as arising from 
affinity; from friendship; from benefits received; from 
contract ; from the general patriotism which connects 
together all the citizens that live on the same soil, or under 
the protection of the same system of polity. 

In considering the duties of affinity, we entered on our 
inquiry with those which belong to the first relationship of 
life, — the relationship that connects together, with a tie as 
delightful as it is indissoluble, the parent and the child. 
We begin to exist under the protection of the duties of 
others, — the objects of a moral regard, of which we are 
soon ourselves to share the reciprocal influence ; and, from 
the moment at which we are capable of understanding that 
there are beings around us who have benefited us, or to 
whom it is in our power to give a single enjoyment, our 
duties too commence, and life itself may be said to be a 
series of duties fulfilled or violated. 



286 



OF THE PARENTAL DUTIES. 



We are the objects of duty, however, before we are 
capable of feeling its force, or of knowing that we have 
ourselves duties to fulfil ; and the nature of this primary 
obligation of the parent, of which we are the objects as soon 
as we have begun to breathe, and which death only can 
dissolve, was considered fully in my last Lecture. The 
preservation of the mere animal existence of the child is an 
office of parental obligation too obvious, however, and too 
simple to require elucidation. Our attention, therefore, 
was given to the other duties which the parental relation 
involves: — in the first place, the duty of giving to him, 
whose wisdom or ignorance, virtue or vice, happiness or 
misery, may depend in a great measure on the nature of 
the instruction and example which he may receive, such 
education as, while it trains him for all the honour and 
usefulness which his rank in life may seem to promise to 
the reasonable expectation of the parent, may not forget 
that this life is but the commencement of immortality, and 
the thoughts and feelings, therefore, which it is most im- 
portant to cultivate, not those which have relation only to 
worldly wealth and dignity, but those to which the proudest 
honours of earthly life are but the accidents of a day. In 
the second place, even with respect to the short period of 
earthly existence, which, short as it is when compared with 
immortality, still admits of many enjoyments, which we 
may supply, or withhold, or lessen, and of many evils which 
we might have prevented ; the duty of affording to the 
child such a provision of the means of worldly comfort and 
usefulness, as is suitable to the circumstances of the parent, 
and of affording this provision to the different members of 
a family, not in the manner which may seem best fitted to 
gratify the personal vanity of the provider, but in the 
manner that is best fitted to contribute to the happiness of 
all who, with, a relationship that is precisely the same, if 
their merits and wants be equal, have a moral claim to equal 
regard, in the distribution that is to provide for those wants. 



OP THE FILIAL DUTIES. 



287 



In the third place, the duty of exercising with kindness the 
parental power ; of imposing no restraint which has not for 
its object some good, greater than the temporary evil of the 
restraint itself, of making the necessary obedience of the 
child in this way not so much a duty as a delight ; and of 
thus preparing him to be, in other years, the grateful and 
tender friend of a parent whose authority, even in its most 
rigid exactions, he has felt only as the watchful tenderness 
of friendship, that was rigid in withholding only what it 
would have been dangerous to grant. 

Having considered, then, the duties of the parent, in all 
their relations to the being to whom he has given existence, 
let us now proceed to consider the reciprocal duties of the 
child. These arise from two sources, — from the power of 
the parent, and from his past kindness. As morally 
responsible, to a certain degree, for the happiness of the 
child, it is evident that he must have over it an authority 
of some sort, without which there could be no power of 
guarding it from the greatest of ail dangers, the dangers of 
its own ignorance and obstinacy. It is equally evident, 
that, as the author of all the benefits which a parent can 
confer, he has a just claim to more than mere authority. 
From the salutary and indispensable power of the parent 
flows the duty of filial obedience : from the benevolence of 
the parent the duty of filial love, and of all the services to 
which that love can lead. Obedience, then, is the first 
filial duty, — a duty which varies in the extent of obligation 
at different periods of life, but which does not cease wholly 
at any period. The child must obey with a subjection that 
is complete, because he is incapable of judging what would 
be most expedient for him, without the direction of another ; 
and no other individual can be supposed so much interested, 
in directing to what is expedient for him, as the parent, 
who must reap an accession of happiness from his happiness, 
or suffer in his sufferings. The man should obey in every 
thing, indeed, in which the obedience will not involve the 



288 



OP THE FILIAL DUTIES. 



sacrifice of a duty, but only some loss of comfort on his 
part : yet he is not, like the child, to obey blindly : for the 
reason which required the blindness of obedience does not 
exist in his case. He is capable of weighing accurately 
duty with duty, because he is capable of seeing consequences 
which the child cannot see. He is not to obey, where he 
could obey only by a crime ; nor, even where the evil to be 
suffered would be only a loss of happiness to himself, can 
he be morally bound to make himself miserable for the 
gratification of a desire that, even in a parent, may be a 
desire of caprice or folly. Where the duty of obedience, in 
such cases, should be considered as terminating, it would 
not be easy to define by words ; since the limit varies, not 
merely with the amount of the sacrifice required, but with 
the extent of former parental favour, that may have required 
a greater or less return of grateful compliance from the 
tenderness of filial obligation. I need not add, that, in any 
case of doubtful duty, a virtuous son will always be inclined 
to widen in some degree, rather than to narrow, the sphere 
of his obedience. 

As the duty of obedience flows from the necessary power 
of the parent, in relation to the ignorance and weakness of 
those who are new to life, and therefore need his guidance, 
the filial duties of another class flow from the benefits con- 
ferred by the parent, benefits greater than can be conferred 
by any other ; since to them is due the very capacity of 
profiting by the benefits of others. Of how many cares 
must every human being have been the subject, before he 
could acquire even the thoughtless vigour of boyhood! and 
how many cares additional were necessary, then, to render 
that thoughtless vigour something more than the mere 
power of doing injury to itself! They whose constant 
attention was thus necessary to preserve our very being, to 
whom we owe the instruction which we have received, and, 
in a great measure too, our very virtues, may have some- 
times, perhaps, exercised a rigour that was unnecessary, or 



OF THE FILIAL DUTIES. 



289 



abstained from affording us comforts which we might have 
enjoyed without any loss of virtue. But still the amount 
of advantage is not to he forgotten on account of some 
slight evil. We owe them much, though we might have 
owed them more ; and, owing them much, we cannot 
morally abstain from paying them the duties of those who 
owe much. They should have no wants while we have 
even the humblest superfluity; or rather, while want is 
opposed to want, ours is not that of which we should be 
the first to think. In their bodily infirmities, we are the 
attendants who should be most assiduous round their couch 
or their chair ; and even those mental infirmities of age 
which are more disgusting, the occasional peevishness 
which reproaches for failures of duty that were not 
intended, the caprice that exacts one day what it would 
not permit the day before, and what it is again to refuse on 
the succeeding day, we are to bear, not as if it were an 
effort to bear them, and a sacrifice to duty, but with that 
tenderness of affection which bears much because it loves 
much, and does uot feel the sacrifices which it occasionally 
makes, because it feels only the love which delights in 
making them. 

Lovely as virtue is in all its forms, there is no form in 
which it is more lovely than in this tender ministry of 
offices of kindness, where the kindness, perhaps, is scarcely 
felt, or considered less as kindness than as the duty which 
might have been fairly demanded, and which there is no 
merit, therefore, in having paid. Though we have often 
the gratification of seeing, in the progress of life, many 
beautiful examples of age that is not more venerable for its 
past virtues, than amiable with a lasting and still increasing 
gentleness, which softens the veneration, indeed, but aug- 
ments it even while it softens it, it is not always that the 
last years of life present to us this delightful aspect ; and 
when the temper is, in these last years, unfortunately 
clouded, — when there is no smile of kindness in the faded 

o 



290 



OF THE FILIAL DUTIES. 



eye, that grows bright again for moments, only when there 
is fretfulness in the heart, — when the voice that is feeble, 
only in the utterance of grateful regard, is still sometimes 
loud, with tones of a very different expression, — the kind- 
ness which, in its unremitting attention, never shows by a 
word or look the sadness that is felt on these undeserved 
reproaches, and that regards them only as proofs of a weak- 
ness that requires still more to be comforted, is a kindness 
which virtue alone can inspire and animate, but which, in 
the bosom that is capable of it, virtue must already have 
well rewarded. How delightful is the spectacle, when, 
amid all the temptations of youth and beauty, we witness 
some gentle heart, that gives to the couch of the feeble, 
and, perhaps, of the thankless and repining, those hours 
which others find, too short for the successive gaieties with 
which an evening can be filled, and that prefers to the smile 
of universal admiration the single smile of enjoyment, which, 
after many vain efforts, has at last been kindled on one 
solitary cheek? 

If filial love be thus ready to bear with bodily and moral 
infirmities, it is not less ready to bear with intellectual 
weakness. There is often, especially in the middle classes 
of life, as great a difference of mental culture in the parent 
and the child as if they had lived at the distance of many 
centuries. The wealth that has been acquired by patient 
industry, or some fortunate adventure, may be employed 
in diffusing all the refinement of science and literature to 
the children of those, to whom the very words, science and 
literature, are words of which they would scarcely be able, 
even with the help of a dictionary, to understand the mean- 
ing. In a rank of life still lower, there are not wanting 
many meritorious individuals, who, uninstructed themselves, 
labour indefatigably to obtain the means of liberal instruc- 
tion for one whose wisdom, in after years, when he is to 
astonish the village, may gratify at once their ambition and 
their love. It would, indeed, be painful to think, that any 



OF THE FILIAL DUTIES. 



291 



one, whose superiority of knowledge lias cost his parents so 
much fatigue, and so many privations of comforts, which, 
but for the expense of the means of his acquired superiority, 
they might have enjoyed, should turn against them, in his 
own mind, the acquirements which were to them of so costly 
a purchase, despising them for the very ignorance which 
gave greater merit to their sacrifice, and proud of a wisdom 
far less noble, when it can thus feel contempt, than the 
humble ignorance which it despises. 

He who, in the fulfilment of every filial duty, has obeyed 
as a son should obey, and loved as a son should love, may 
not, indeed, with all his obedience and affection, have been 
able to return an amount of benefit equal to that which he 
has received ; but, in being thus virtuous, he has at least 
made the return that is most grateful to a virtuous parent's 
heart. He has not been unsuccessful in that contest of 
mutual love, in which, as Seneca truly says, it is happy to 
conquer, and happy to be overcome. " Alia ex aliis exempla 
subeunt," — he remarks, after citing many instances of filial 
duty, — " eorum qui parentes suos periculis eripuerunt, qui ex 
infimo ad summum protulerunt, et e plebe acervoque ignobili 
nunquam tacendos saeculis dederunt. Nulla vi verborum, 
nulla ingenii facultate exprimi potest, quantum opus sit, quam 
laudabile, quamque nunquam a memoria hominum exiturum, 
posse hoc dicere, Parentibus meis parui, cessi : imperio 
eorum, sive aequum, sive iniquum ac durum fuit, obse- 
quentem submissumque me praebui : ad hoc unum con- 
tumax fui, ne beneficiis vincerer. Felices qui vicerint : 
felices qui vincentur. Quid eo adolescente praeclarius, qui 
sibi ipsi dicere poterit (neque enim fas est alteri dicere) 
Patrem meum beneficiis vici ! Quid eo fortunatius sene, 
qui omnibus ubique praedicabit, a filio suo se beneficiis 
victum ! " 1 

Such is that beautiful arrangement of Heaven, to which 
1 De Beneficiis, lib. iii. cap. xxxviii. 



292 



OF THE FILIAL DUTIES. 



I have already so often alluded, that, in adapting the weak- 
ness of one generation to the strength of the generation 
which preceded it, and to the love which finds an object of 
increasing regard in the very wants which are every 
moment relieved or prevented, has made that which might 
seem to common eyes a provision only for the continued 
existence of the race of man, a source of more than half 
the virtues of mankind. It is thus truly, as Pope says, 
that he 

Who framed a whole, the whole to bless, 
On mutual wants built mutual happiness. 
So, from the first, eternal order ran, 
And creature link'd to creature, man to man. 
Whate'er of life all-quickening ether keeps, 
Or breathes through air, or shoots beneath the deeps, 
Or pours profuse on earth, one nature feeds 
The vital flame, and swells the genial seeds. 
Thus beast and bird their common charge attend, 
The mothers nurse it, and the sires defend ; 
The young dismiss'd to wander earth or air, 
There stops the instinct, and there ends the care, 
The link dissolves, each seeks a fresh embrace, 
Another love succeeds, another race. 
A longer care Man's helpless kind demands ; 
That longer care contracts more lasting bands. 
Still as one brood, and as another rose, 
These natural love maintained, habitual those. 
Reflection, reason, still the ties improve, 
At once extend the interest and the love ; 
And still new needs, new helps, new habits rise, 
That graft benevolence on charities. 1 

Next in order to the relationship of the parent and child, 
may be considered the relation which the child bears to 
those who are united with him by the same tie, to the 
same parental bosoms. If friendship be delightful, if it be 



1 Essay on Man, Ep. iii. Ill, &c. 



OF THE FRATERNAL DUTIES. 



293 



above all delightful to enjoy the continued friendship of 
those who are endeared to us by the intimacy of many 
years, who can discourse with us of the frolics of the school, 
of the adventures and studies of the college, of the years 
when we first ranked ourselves with men in the free society of 
the world, how delightful must be the friendship of those who, 
accompanying us through all this long period, with a closer 
union than any casual friend, can go still farther back, from 
the school to the very nursery which witnessed our common 
pastimes, who hav^e had an interest in every event that has 
related to us, and in every person that has excited our love 
or our hatred, who have honoured with us those to whom 
we have paid every filial honour in life, and wept with us 
over those whose death has been to us the most lasting 
sorrow of our heart. Such, in its wide unbroken sympathy, 
is the friendship of brothers, considered ev^en as friendship 
only ; and how many circumstances of additional interest 
does this union receive from the common relationship to 
those who have original claims to our still higher regard, 
and to whom we offer an acceptable service, in extending 
our affection to those whom they love. In treating of the 
circumstances that tend peculiarly to strengthen this tie, 
Cicero extends his view even to the common sepulchre that 
is at last to enclose us : " Sanguinis conjunctio devincit 
caritate homines. Magnum est enim, eadem habere monu- 
menta majorum, iisdem uti sacris, sepulchra habere com- 
munia." It is, indeed, a powerful image, a symbol, and 
almost a lesson of unanimity. Every dissension of man 
with man excites in us a feeling of painful incongruity. 
But we feel a peculiar incongruity in the discord of those 
whom one roof has continued to shelter during life, and 
whose dust is afterwards to be mingled under a single 
stone. 

On the fraternal duties, however, I need not dwell, be- 
cause they may be considered very nearly in the same light 
as the duties of that friendship to which I have already 



294 



OF THE FRATERNAL DUTIES. 



compared them, the duties of a cordial intimacy rendered 
more sacred by relationship to the parents from whom we 
have sprung, and to whom we owe common duties, as we 
have been objects of common cares. By the peculiar 
domestic attachments of this sort, and the mutual services 
thence arising, the world is benefited with the accession 
to its general happiness, of the reciprocal enjoyments of a 
regard that has already found friends, before it could have 
thought of seeking them. Surrounded by the aged, or at 
least by those who are aged in relation to his first years of 
boyhood, the child would have learned only to respect and 
obey. With the little society of his equals around him, he 
learns that independence and equality of friendship, which 
train him to the affections that are worthy of a free and 
undaunted spirit, in the liberty and equal society of maturer 
years. As a son, he learns to be a good subject ; as a 
brother, he learns to be a good citizen. 

The duties which we owe to more distant relations, vary, 
as might naturally be supposed, with the circumstances of 
society, according to the varying necessity of mutual aid. 
Where the protection of law is feeble, and it is necessary 
therefore for many to unite in common defence, the families 
that spring from one common stock continue to cling to 
each other for aid almost as if they lived together under the 
same roof ; it is truly one wide family rather than a number 
of families : the history of the tribe, in its most remote 
years of warfare and victory, is the history of each indivi- 
dual of the tribe ; and the mere remembrance of the ex- 
ploits of those who fought with one common object, around 
the representative of their common ancestor, is, like the 
feeling of the fraternal or filial relation itself, prolonged 
from age to age ; while the affection thus flowing from the 
remembrance of other years is continually strengthened by 
the important services which each individual is still able to 
perform for the whole, on occasions of similar peril. In 
other circumstances of society, the necessity of this mutual 



OF THE FRATERNAL DUTIES. 



295 



aid is obviated by the happier protection of equal law ; and 
objects of new ambition, separating the little community 
into families that have their own peculiar interests, with 
little, if any, necessity for reciprocations of assistance, the 
duty of giving such assistance is at once less important, and 
no longer receives any aid from the powerful circumstances 
of association, which, in a different state of manners, ren- 
dered the most distant relative an object of almost sacred 
regard. 

" It is not many years ago," says Dr. Smith, " that in 
the Highlands of Scotland, the chieftain used to consider 
the poorest man of his clan as his cousin and relation. The 
same extensive regard to kindred is said to take place 
amoug the Tartars, the Arabs, the Turkomans, and, I be- 
lieve, among all other nations who are nearly in the same 
state of society in which the Scots Highlanders were about 
the beginning of the present century. 

" In commercial countries, where the authority of law is 
always perfectly sufficient to protect the meanest man in 
the state, the descendants of the same family, having no 
such motive for keeping together, naturally separate and 
disperse, as interest or inclination may direct. They soon 
cease to be of importance to one another ; and, in a few 
generations, not only lose all care about one another, but 
all remembrance of their common origin, and of the con- 
nexion which took place among their ancestors. Regard for 
remote relations becomes, in every country, less and less, 
according as this state of civilization has been longer and 
more completely established. It has been longer and more 
completely established in England than in Scotland ; and 
remote relations are, accordingly, more considered in the 
latter country than in the former, though, in this respect, 
the difference between the two countries is growing less and 
less every day. Great lords, indeed, are, in every country, 
proud of remembering and acknowledging their connexion 
with one another, however remote. The remembrance of 



OF THE DUTIES OF THE 



such illustrious relations flatters not a little the family pride 
of them all ; and it is neither from affection, nor from any 
thing which resembles affection, but from the most frivo- 
lous and childish of all vanities, that this remembrance is 
so carefully kept up. Should some more humble, though 
perhaps much nearer kinsman, presume to put such great 
men in mind of his relation to their family, they seldom 
fail to tell him that they are bad genealogists, and miser- 
ably ill informed concerning their own family history. It 
is not in that order, I am afraid, that we are to expect any 
extraordinary extension of what is called natural affection." 1 

The duties to which I next proceed, are those which flow 
from an affection that is one of the most powerful indeed of 
the affections which nature prompts, but to which she does 
not point out any particular individual as demanding it, 
without our choice. The only influence which she exercises 
is on our choice itself. 

It is the conjugal relation of which I speak, — a relation 
of which the duties, like the duties of all our other recipro- 
cal affinities, however minutely divided and subdivided, are 
involved in the simple obligation to make those who are the 
objects of it as happy as it is in our power to make them. 

In these few simple words, however, what a complica- 
tion of duties is involved, of duties which it is less easy for 
the ethical inquirer to state and define, than for the heart 
which feels affection to exercise them all with instant readi- 
ness. He who loves sincerely the object of any one of 
those relations which bind us together in amity, and who 
is wise enough to discern the difference of conferring a 
momentary gratification which may produce more misery 
than happiness, and of conferring that which is not merely 
present happiness, but a source of future enjoyment, needs 
no rule of duty, as far at least as relates to that single in- 



1 Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. ii. pp. 70-72. 10th edition. 



CONJUGAL RELATION. 



297 



dividual, for the direction of a conduct, of which love itself, 
unaided by any other guidance, will he a quick and vigilant 
director. 

The husband should have, then, as his great object and 
rule of conduct, the happiness of the wife. Of that happi- 
ness, the confidence in his affection is the chief element ; 
and the proofs of this affection on his part, therefore, con- 
stitute his chief duty, — an affection that is not lavish of 
caresses only, as if these were the only demonstrations of 
love, but of that respect which distinguishes love as a prin- 
ciple, from that brief passion which assumes, and only as- 
sumes the name, — a respect which consults the judgment, 
as well as the wishes of the object beloved, which considers 
her who is worthy of being taken to the heart, as worthy 
of being admitted to all the counsels of the heart. If there 
are any delights, of which he feels the value as essential to 
his own happiness, if his soul be sensible to the charms of 
literary excellence, and if he consider the improvement of 
his own understanding, and the cultivation of his own taste, 
as a duty, and one of the most delightful duties of an intel- 
lectual being, he will not consider it as a duty or a delight 
that belongs only to man, but will feel it more delightful, 
as there is now another soul that may share with him all 
the pleasure of the progress. To love the happiness of her 
whose happiness is in his affection, is of course to be con- 
jugally faithful ; but it is more than to be merely faithful ; 
it is not to allow room even for a doubt as to that fidelity, 
at least for such a doubt as a reasonable mind might form. 
It is truly to love her best, but it is also to seem to feel 
that love which is truly felt. 

As the happiness of the wife is the rule of conjugal 
duty to the husband, the happiness of the husband is in 
like manner the rule of conjugal duty to the wife. There 
is no human being whose affection is to be to her like his 
affection, as there is no happiness which is to be to her like 
the happiness which he enjoys. All which I have said of 

o2 



298 



OF THE DUTIES OF THE 



the moral obligation of the husband, then, is not less appli- 
cable to her duty ; but, though the gentle duties belong to 
both, it is to her province that they more especially belong, 
because she is at once best fitted by nature for the ministry 
of tender courtesies, and best exercised in the offices that 
inspire them. While man is occupied in other cares during 
the business of the day, the business of her day is but the 
continued discharge of many little duties that have a direct 
relation to wedlock, in the common household which it has 
formed. He must often forget her, or be useless to the 
world : she is most useful to the world by remembering 
him. From the tumultuous scenes which agitate many of 
his hours, he returns to the calm scene, where peace awaits 
him, and happiness is sure to await him, because she is 
there waiting, whose smile is peace, and whose yery 
presence is more than happiness to his heart. 

Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights 
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings — 
Here reigns and revels. 1 

The vows, which constitute a solemn part of the matri- 
monial engagement, give to this duty of reciprocal love the 
sanction of an additional authority ; but they only give an 
additional sanction, and increase the guilt of violating duties, 
which, without these vows, it would still have been guilt 
to violate. 

The husband is to seek the happiness of his wife, the 
wife to seek the happiness of her husband. This rule is 
sufficiently simple and efficacious, where affection is suffi- 
ciently strong, as in the domestic scenes of harmony and 
delight which I have pictured. But there may be cases of 
occasional disagreement ; and then what is the duty ? In 
such cases, it is obviously necessary, that, for mutual peace, 
the will of one should be submitted to the will of the 



1 Paradise Lost, book iv. 763-765. 



CONJUGAL RELATION. 



299 



other ; and, if a point so important as this were left to the 
decision of the individuals themselves, without any feeling 
of greater duty on either side, the disagreement, it is evi- 
dent, would still be continued, under a different name ; 
and, instead of combating who should concede, the con- 
troversy would be, of whom it was the duty to make the 
concession. It is of most important advantage, therefore, 
upon the whole, that there should be a feeling of duty to 
be called in for decision in such unfortunate cases ; and 
since, from various circumstances, natural and factitious, 
man is every where in possession of physical and political 
superiority ; since his education is usually less imperfect, 
and since the charge of providing for the support of the 
family, in almost every instance, belongs to him. y it is 
surely, from all these circumstances, fit, upon the whole, 
that, if the power of decision, in doubtful matters, should 
be given to one rather than to the other, it should be with 
man that it is to rest, whatever number of exceptions there 
may be, in which, but for the importance of the general 
rule, it would have been of advantage that woman, in those 
cases the wiser and more virtuous, were the decider. 

The power of decision, therefore, which, for the sake of 
peace, must be understood as resting somewhere, should 
rest with man ; but though it rest with him, it is only in 
unfortunate cases, as I before said, that the power of autho- 
ritative decision should be exercised. In the general cir- 
cumstances of conjugal life, there should be absolute 
equality, because, where love should be equal, there should 
be that equal desire of conferring happiness, which is im- 
plied in equality of love ; and he who, from the mere wish 
of gratifying his feeling of superiority, can wilfully thwart 
a wish of her whose wishes, where they do not lead to any 
moral or prudential impropriety, should be to him like his 
own, or even dearer than his own, if they did not truly 
become his wishes, when known to be hers, would deserve 
no slight punishment, as the violator of conjugal obligation, 



SOD 



OF THE DUTIES OF THE 



if he were not almost sufficiently punished in the very want 
of that better affection, the delightful feeling of which would 
have saved him from his tyranny of power. 

" The husband, it has been said, should decide in affairs 
of importance ; the wife in smaller matters. But the hus- 
band should decide, in consulting his wife, the wife in 
seeking what is to please her husband. Let them learn 
often the pleasure of mutual concessions. Let them say 
often, I wish this because it is right ; but let them say 
sometimes, too, I wish this much, because I love you." 1 

The great evil, in matrimonial life, is the cessation of 
those cares which were regarded as necessary for obtaining 
love, but which are unfortunately conceived to be less neces- 
sary when love is once obtained. The carelessnesses of a 
husband are not less severely felt, however, because they 
are the neglects of one whose attentions are more valuable, 
as he who offers them is more valued ; and frequent in- 
attentions, by producing frequent displeasure, may at last, 
though they do not destroy love wholly, destroy the best 
happiness of love. No advice can be more salutary for 
happiness, than that which recommends an equal attention 
to please, and anxiety not to offend, after twenty years of 
wedlock, as when it was the object of the lover to awake 
the passion, on which he conceived every enjoyment of his 
life to depend. We gain at least as much in preserving a 
heart as in conquering one. 

The cessation of these cares would be, of itself, no slight 
evil, even though love had originally been less profuse of 
them than it usually is, in the extravagance of an unreflect- 
ing passion. She who has been worshipped as a goddess, 
must feel doubly the insult of the neglect which afterwards 
disdains to bestow on her the common honour that is paid 
to woman ; and with the ordinary passions of a human 
being, it will be difficult for her to retain, I will not say 

De St. Lambert, (Euvres Philosophiques, tome iii. p. 38. 



CONJUGAL RELATION. 



301 



love, for that is abandoned, but the decorous and dignified 
semblance of love, for him who has cared little for the 
reality of it. It is not easy to say by how insensible a 
transition, in many cases, this conjugal resentment, or 
forced indifference, passes into conjugal infidelity ; though 
it is easy, in such a case, to determine to whom the greater 
portion of the guilt is to be ascribed. 

But it will perhaps be said, love is not dependent on our 
mere will, and how can we continue to love one whom no 
effort of ours can prevent us from discovering to be un- 
worthy of our continued affection ? But by whom is this 
objection usually made ? Not by those who, in engaging 
to love, and honour, and cherish during life, have been 
careful in considering who it was to whom they entered 
under this solemn engagement. It is, in almost every 
instance, the objection of those who, when they formed the 
engagment, made a vow, of the real import of which they 
were regardless ; and who afterwards dare to plead one 
crime as the justification of another. There are duties of 
marriage which begin before the marriage itself, in the 
provision that is made for matrimonial virtue and happi- 
ness ; and he who neglects the means of virtuous love, in 
a state of which virtuous love is to be the principal charm, 
is far more inconsiderate and far more guilty than the 
heedless producer of misery, who forms a matrimonial con- 
nexion without the prospect of any means of subsistence fur 
one who is to exist with him, only to suffer with him in 
indigence, and for the little sufferers who are afterwards to 
make indigence still more painfully felt. He who has 
vowed to love one to whom he pledges love, only because he 
knows that she is worthy of such a pledge, will not after- 
wards have reason to complain of the difficulty of loving 
the unworthy. 

If, however, it be necessary for man to be careful to 
whom he engages himself by a vow so solemn, it is surely 
not less necessary for the gentler tenderness of woman. 



S02 



OF THE DUTIES OF THE 



She, too, has duties to fulfil, that depend on love, or at 
least that can be sweetened only by love ; and when she 
engages to perform them where love is not felt, she is 
little aware of the precariousness of such a pledge, and of 
the perils to which she is exposing herself. It is truly 
painful then to see, in the intercourse of the world, how 
seldom affection is considered as a necessary matrimonial 
preliminary, at least in one of the parties, and in the one 
to whom it is the more necessary ; and how much quicker 
the judgment of fathers, mothers, friends, is to estimate the 
wealth or the worldly dignity than the wisdom or the vir- 
tue which they present as a fit offering to her, whom wealth 
and worldly dignity may render only weaker and more 
miserable, but whom wisdom might counsel and virtue 
cherish. It is painful to see one who has, in other respects, 
perhaps, many moral excellencies, consent, as an accomplice 
in this fraud, to forego the moral delicacy which condemns 
the apparent sale of affection that is not to be sold, — re- 
joice in the splendid sacrifice which is thus made of her 
peace, — consign her person to one whom she despises, with 
the same indifference as she consigns her hand, — a prosti- 
tute for gold, not less truly because the prostitution is to 
be for life, and not less criminally a prostitute, because to 
the guilt and meanness of the pecuniary barter, are added 
the guilt of a mockery of tenderness that wishes to deceive 
man, and the still greater guilt of a perjury that, in vows 
which the heart belies, would wish to deceive the God on 
whom it calls to sanction the deceit. 

When marriages are thus formed, it is not for the sufferer 
to complain, if she find that she has acquired a few more 
trappings of wealth, but not a husband. She has her house, 
her carriage, and the living machines that are paid to wait 
around her and obey her ; she takes rank in public spec- 
tacles, and presides in her own mansion in spectacles as 
magnificent ; she has obtained all which she wished to 



CONJUGAL RELATION. 



SOS 



obtain ; and the affection and happiness which she scorned, 
she must leave to those who sought them. 

" There is a place on the earth, it has been said, where 
pure joys are unknown, from which politeness is banished, 
and has given place to selfishness, contradictions, and half- 
veiled insults. Remorse and inquietude, like furies that 
are never weary of assailing, torment the inhabitants. This 
place is the house of a wedded pair who have no mutual 
love, nor even esteem, There is a place on the earth to 
which vice has no entrance, where the gloomy passions 
have no empire, where pleasure and innocence live con- 
stantly together, where cares and labours are delightful, 
where every pain is forgotten in reciprocal tenderness, 
where there is an equal enjoyment of the past, the present, 
and the future. It is the house too of a wedded pair, but 
of a pair who, in wedlock, are lovers still." 1 



LECTURE XVII. 

OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP ; DUTIES OF GRATITUDE. 

In our arrangement of the duties which we owe to par- 
ticular individuals, as reducible to five orders, those 
which arise from affinity, you will remember, constituted 
the first division. 

The particular duties as yet considered by us, have all 
belonged to this first division, the duties of relationship, 
parental, filial, fraternal, conjugal ; in the exercise of which » 
and in the reciprocal enjoyment of them as exercised by 
others, is to be found that gracious system of domestic 
virtue, under the shelter of which man reposes in happiness, 



1 De St. Lambert, CEuv. Phil, tome ii. p. 68. 



304 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



and resting thus, in the confidence of affection and delight, 
becomes purer of heart, and more actively beneficent, by 
the very happiness which he feels. 

It is of these domestic virtues that we must think, when 
we think of the morals of a nation. A nation is but a 
shorter name for the individuals who compose it ; and 
when these are good fathers, good sons, good brothers, good 
husbands, they will be good citizens ; because the principles 
which make them just and kind under the domestic roof, 
will make them just and kind to those who inhabit with 
them that country which is only a larger home. The 
household fire, and the altar, which are coupled together 
in the exhortations of the leaders of armies, and in the hearts 
of those whom they address, have a relation more intimate 
than that of which they think, who combat for both. It is 
before the household fire, that every thing which is holy 
and worthy of the altar is formed. There arose the virtues 
that were the virtues of the child, before they were the 
virtues of the warrior or the statesman ; and the mother 
who weeps with delight at the glory of her son, when a 
whole nation is exulting with her, rejoices over the same 
heroic fortitude, that at a period almost as delightful to her 
in the little sacrifices which boyish generosity could make, 
had already often gladdened her heart, when she thought 
only of the gentle virtues before her, and was not aware of 
half the worth of that noble offering which she was speedily 
to make to her country and to the world. 

From the domestic affinities, the transition is a very easy 
one, to that bond of affection which unites friend to friend, 
and gives rise to an order of duties almost equal in force to 
those of the nearest affinity. 

We are formed to be virtuous, to feel pleasure in con- 
templating those parts of our life which present to us the 
remembrance of good deeds, as we feel pain in contemplat- 
ing other portions of it, which present to us only remem- 
brances of moral evil ; and the same principle which makes 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



305 



us love in ourselves what is virtuous, renders it impossible 
for us to look with indifference on the virtues of another. 
The principle of moral emotion alone would thus be 
sufficient to lead to friendship, though there were no other 
principle in our nature that could tend to make a single 
human being an object of our regard. 

But we are not lovers of virtue only ; we are lovers of 
many other qualities, which add to our happiness not so 
much as our own virtues indeed, but often as much as we 
could derive, in the same space of time, from the mere 
virtue of those with whom we mix in society. We love 
gaiety, and we therefore love those who can render us gay, 
by their wit, by the fluency of their social eloquence, by 
those never-ceasing smiles of good humour, which are 
almost, to our quick sympathy of emotion, like wit and 
eloquence ; we hate sorrow, and we love those who, by the 
same powerful aid, can enable us to shake off the burden 
of melancholy, from which our own efforts are, as we have 
too often found, unable of themselves to free us ; we have 
plans of business or amusement, and we love those whose 
co-operation is necessary to their success, and who readily 
afford to us that co-operation which we need ; we are 
doubtful, in many cases, as to the propriety of our own 
conduct, and if all others acted differently, we should be 
driven back to the uncertainty or the reproach of our own 
conscience, without any consolation from without ; we 
therefore love those who, by acting as we act, seem to say 
to us that we have done well ; or who, at least, when it 
is impossible for us to flatter ourselves with this illusion, 
comfort us with the only palliation which our conscience 
can admit, that we are not more reprehensible than others 
around us. Even without regard to all these causes of 
love, it is miserable to us to be alone. The very nature of 
all our emotions leads them to pour themselves out to some 
other breast; and the stronger the emotion, the more 
ardent is this propensity. We must make some one know 



806 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



why we are glad, or our gladness will be an oppression to 
us, almost as much as a delight. If we are in wrath, our 
anger seems to us incomplete, till not one only, but many, 
share our resentment. The sovereign would feel little 
pleasure in all the splendour of his throne, if he were to sit 
upon it for ever, with subjects around him to whom he was 
to be always a sovereign, and only a sovereign ; and the 
very misanthrope, who abandons the race of mankind, in 
his detestation of their iniquity, must still have some one 
with whom he may give vent to his indignation, by 
describing the happiness which he feels, in having left the 
wicked to that universal wickedness which is worthy of 
them, and which he almost loves, because it enables him to 
hate them more thoroughly. 

Thus lavish has nature been to us of the principles of 
friendship. With all these causes, that, singly, might 
dispose to cordial intercourse, and that exert in most cases 
an united influence, it is not wonderful that the tendency 
to friendship of some sort should be a part of our mental 
constitution, almost as essential to it as any of our appetites. 
It is scarcely a metaphor, indeed, which we employ, when 
we term it an appetite, an appetite arising from our very 
nature as social beings ; and, if our appetites, like our 
other desires, bear any proportion to the amount of the 
good which is their object, it must be one of the most vivid 
which it is possible for us to feel ; because it relates to a 
species of happiness which is among the most vivid of our 
enjoyments ; in many cases approaching the delight of the 
most intimate domestic relations, and scarcely to be counted 
inferior to the delight arising from any other source, unless 
when we think of that virtue which is essential to the 
enjoyment of all. To take friendship from life, says Cicero, 
would be almost the same thing, as to take the sun from 
the world. " Solem a mundo tollere videntur, qui amicitiam 
e vita tollunt." It is, indeed, the sunshine of those who 
otherwise would walk in darkness ; it beams with unclouded 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 307 

radiance on our moral patb, and is itself warmth and beauty 
to the very path along which it invites us to proceed. He 
knows not how poor all the splendours of worldly prosperity 
are in themselves, who enjoys them with that increase of 
happiness which friendship has given to them ; and he who 
is still rich enough to have a friend, cannot know what 
extreme poverty and misery are ; because the only misery 
which is truly misery, is that which has no one to comfort 
it. 

Celestial Happiness ! whene'er she stoops 
To visit earth, one shrine the goddess finds ; 
And one alone, to make her sweet amends 
For absent Heaven, — the bosom of a friend ; 
Where heart meets heart, reciprocally soft, 
Each other's pillow to repose divine. 1 

" Quantum bonum est, ubi sunt praeparata pectora, in 
quae tutb secretum omne descendat, quorum conscientiam 
minus quam tuam timeas, quorum sermo solicitudinem leniat, 
sententia consilium expediat, hilaritas tristitiam dissipet, 
conspectus ipse delectet." How great a blessing is it, to 
have bosoms ever ready for receiving and preserving 
faithfully whatever we may wish to confide; whose 
conscious memory of our actions we may fear less than 
our own, whose discourse may alleviate our anxiety, whose 
counsel may fix our own doubtful judgment, whose hilarity 
may dissipate our sorrow, whose very aspect may delight. 

There is unquestionably, in the very presence of a friend, 
a delight of this sort, which has no other source than the 
consciousness of the presence of one who feels for us the 
regard which we feel for him. " When I ask myself," says 
Montaigne, after a very lively description which he gives of 
his affection for his friend, — " When I ask myself, whence 
it is that I feel this joy, this ease, this serenity, when I see 
him, — it is because it is he, it is because it is I, I answer ; 
and this is all which I can say." 

1 Night Thoughts, Night ii. 



308 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



On the delight which friendship affords, however, it 
would be idle to expatiate. There is no subject, scarcely 
even with the exception of love itself, on which so much 
has been written, by philosophers and declainiers of all 
sorts, in prose and poetry. I might repeat to you innume- 
rable commonplaces on the subject, and prove to you 
logically, by many arguments, that what you have all felt 
to be delightful, is delightful. For the evidence of this, 
however, I may safely leave you to your own consciousness. 
You have many friendships, and perhaps your most impor- 
tant and permanent friendships, still to form ; but if you 
have never yet felt what friendship is, there is little reason 
to think that you will ever feel it ; and if you have felt it, 
though you may not yet have been in situations that might 
enable you to derive from it all the advantages which it is 
capable of yielding, the very consciousness of the regard 
itself will enable you to anticipate them all. He who has 
never been in poverty, in long and almost hopeless disease, 
in any deep distress of any sort, may yet know what 
consolation the attentions of friendship would administer 
to the sorrow which he has never felt ; and if he ever feel 
the sorrow and the consolation, will not acquire any new 
knowledge of the extent of the delightful influence which 
he had long known how to appreciate, but only a new cause 
of gratitude to him, who, in doing much, had done only 
what it was expected of his ready tenderness and generosity 
to do. " There is, indeed," as it has been truly said, " only 
one species of misery which friendship cannot comfort, — 
the misery of atrocious guilt ; but hearts capable of genuine 
friendship, are not capable of committing crimes. Though 
it cannot comfort guilt, however, which ought not to be 
comforted, friendship is still able to console at least the too 
powerful remembrance of our faults and weaknesses ; its 
voice reconciles us to ourselves ; it shows us the means of 
rising again from our fall ; and our fall itself it leads others 
to forget, in the same manner as it leads us to forget it, by 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



309 



recalling to us and to others our estimable qualities, and 
prompting us to the exercise of them. Friendship repairs 
every thing, remedies every thing, comforts every thing." 1 

Friendship, however, is not a source of pleasure only ; it 
is also a source of duty ; and it is chiefly in this respect 
that we are now to regard it. 

The duties that relate to friendship may he considered in 
three lights ; as they regard the commencement of it, the 
continuance of it, and its close. 

Our first duties are those which relate to the choice of a 
friend. 

If we were sufficiently aware how great a command over 
our whole life we give to any one whom we admit to our 
intimacy ; how ready we are to adopt the errors of those 
whom we love ; and to regard their very faults, not merely 
as excusable, but as objects of imitation, or at least to imitate 
them without thinking whether they ought to be imitated, 
and without knowing even that we are imitating them ; we 
should be a little more careful than we usually are, in 
making a choice, which is to decide in a great measure 
whether we are to be A r irtuous or vicious, happy or 
miserable ; or which, in many cases, if we still continue 
happy, upon the whole, must often disturb our happiness, 
and, if we still continue virtuous, make virtue a greater 
effort. " The bandage which, in our poetic fictions, we give 
to Love," says the Marchioness de Lambert, "we have 
never thought of hanging over the clear and piercing 
eyes of Friendship. Friendship has no blindness : it 
examines before it engages, and attaches itself only to 
merit." 2 

The picture is a beautiful one ; but it is a picture rather 
of what friendship ought to be, than of what friendship 
always is. The bandage, indeed, is not so thick as that 
which covers the eyes of Love, and it is not so constantly 

1 De St. Lambert, CEuvres Philosophiques, tome iii. p. 82. 

2 De St. Lambert, (Euvres, tome i. p. 236. Paris, 1761. 



310 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



worn ; but when it is worn, though it admits some light, 
it does not admit all. We must tear it off before we see 
clearly ; or we must be careful at least what hands they 
are which we permit to put it on. 

It is before we yield ourselves, then, to the regard, that 
we should strive to estimate the object of it, and to estimate 
his value, not by the gratification of a single day, but by 
the influence which he may continue to exercise on our life. 
If friendship, indeed, were a mere pastime, that ended with 
the amusement of some idle hours, it might be allowed to 
us to select, for our companions, those who might best 
amuse our idleness ; it would be enough to us then that our 
friend was gay, and had the happy talent of making others 
gay. If it were a mere barter of courtesy, for a little 
wealth or distinction, it might be allowed to us, in like 
manner, to select those whose power and opulence seemed 
to promise to our ambition and avarice the best return of 
gain ; it would then be enough if our friend possessed a 
station that might enable him to elevate us, not perhaps to 
his own rank, but at least a little higher than we are. 
Then, indeed, the propriety or impropriety of friendship 
might be estimated as readily, and almost in the same 
manner, as we estimate the worth of any common market- 
able commodity. But if it be an alliance of heart with 
heart, — if, in giving our sorrows or projects to be shared by 
another, we are to partake, in our turn, his sorrows or 
designs, whatever they may be, — to consider the virtue of 
him whom we admit to this diffusion with us of one common 
being, and to yield our affection, only as we discover the 
virtue which alone is worthy of it, is almost the same 
thing as to consult for our own virtue. The vice of him 
whom we love, — the vice which we must palliate to every 
censurer, and which we strive to palliate even to our own 
severe judgment, will soon cease to appear to us what it is ; 
and it will require but a little longer habit of palliation, 
and a little longer intercourse of cordial regard, to win 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



311 



from us that occasional conformity which, with us too, may 
soon become a habit. Even though we escaped from the 
vices of the wicked, however, it would be impossible for us 
to escape from their misery. We must share the embar- 
rassments and vexations, the fear and the disgrace, to 
which their moral errors must inevitably lead them ; and 
though the friendship of the virtuous had no other supe- 
riority of attraction than this one, it would still be enough 
to determine the choice of the wise, — that, in becoming the 
friends of the good, they would have nothing to fear but 
misfortunes, which require pity only, and consolation, not 
shame ; that, if they had no reason to blush for themselves, 
they would have no reason to blush for those whom, by 
their selection, they had exhibited to the world as images of 
their own character ; nor to feel, in the very innocence of 
their own heart, by the moral perplexities in which their 
sympathies involved them, if not what is hateful in guilt, at 
least all which is wretched in it. 

A single line of one of our old poets conveys, in this 
respect, a most sententious lesson, in bidding us consider 
what sort of a friend he is likely to prove to us, who has 
been the destroyer, or at least the constant disquieter, of 
his own happiness. 

See if he be 

Friend to himself, who would be friend to thee. 

The necessity of virtue, then, in every bosom of which 
we resolve to share the feelings, would be sufficiently evi- 
dent, though we were to consider those feelings only ; but 
all the participation is not to be on our part. We are to 
place confidence, as well as to receive it ; we are not to be 
comforters only, but sometimes, too, the comforted ; and 
our own conduct may require the defence which we are 
sufficiently ready to afford to the conduct of our friend. 
Even with respect to the pleasure of the friendship itself, 
if it be a pleasure on which we set a high value, it is not a 



S12 



OP THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



slight consideration whether it be fixed on one whose 
regard is likely to be as stable as ours, or on one who may 
in a few months, or perhaps even in a few weeks, withhold 
from us the very pleasure of that intimacy which before 
had been profusely lavished on us. In every one of the.se 
respects, I need not point out to you the manifest supe- 
riority of virtue over vice. Virtue only is stable, because 
virtue only is consistent ; and the caprice which, under a 
momentary impulse, begins an eager intimacy with one, 
as it began it from an impulse as momentary with another, 
will soon find a third, with whom it may again begin it, 
with the same exclusion, for the moment, of every previous 
attachment. Nothing can be juster than the observation 
of Rousseau on these hasty starts of kindness, that " he 
who treats us at first sight like a friend of twenty years' 
standing, will A^ery probably, at the end of twenty years, 
treat us as a stranger if we have any important service to 
request of him." 

If, without virtue, we have little to hope in stability, 
have we, even while the semblance of friendship lasts, much 
more to hope as to those services of kindness which we may 
need from our friends ? The secrets which it may be of no 
importance to divulge, all may keep with equal fidelity ; 
because nothing is to be gained by circulating what no one 
would take sufficient interest in hearing, to remember after 
it was heard ; but if the secret be of a kind which, if made 
known, would gain the favour of some one whose favour it 
would be more profitable to gain than to retain ours, can 
we expect fidelity from a mind that thinks only of what is 
to be gained by vice, in the great social market of moral 
feelings, not of what it is right to do? Can we expect 
consolation in our affliction from one who regards our 
adversity only as a sign that there is nothing more to be 
hoped from our intimacy ; or trust our virtues to the defence 
of him who defends or assails as interest prompts, and who 
may see his interest in representing us as guilty of the very 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



313 



crimes with which slander has loaded us ? In such cases, 
we have no title to complain of the treacheries of friendship ; 
for it was not friendship in which we trusted ; the treachery 
is as much the fault of the deceived as of the deceiver : 
we have ourselves violated some of the most important 
duties of friendship, the duties which relate to its com- 
mencement. 

When friendship has commenced, after all those neces- 
sary cautions which form its first set of duties, a new set 
of duties begin their obligation. We have chosen cautiously, 
and we are now to confide : we have chosen one whom it is 
virtuous to love, and we are to perform to him all the 
services of love. 

We are to confide, in the first place, not with that timid, 
irresolute communication of our plans and wishes, which 
almost provokes to the very infidelity that appears to be 
suspected, but with that full opening of the heart, withou 
which there is no confidence, and therefore none of the 
advantages of confidence. " If you think any one your 
friend," a Roman moralist says, " in whom you do not put 
the same confidence as in yourself, you know not the real 
power of friendship. Consider long, whether the individual 
whom you view with regard, is worthy of being admitted 
to your bosom ; but when you have judged, and found him 
truly worthy, admit him to your very heart. You should so 
live, indeed, as to trust nothing to your own conscience which 
you would not trust to your enemy ; but, at least to your 
friend, let all be open. He will be the more faithful, as 
your confidence in his fidelity is more complete." Si 
aliquem amicum existimas, cui non tantundem credis 
quantum tibi, vehementer erras, et non satis nosti vim verae 
amicitiae. Tu vero omnia cum amico delibera, sed de ipsa 
prius. Post amicitiam credendum est, ante amicitiam 
judieandum. Isti vero praepostere officia permiscent, qui, 
contra praecepta Theophrasti, cum amaverint judicant, et 
non amant cum judicaverint. Diu cogita, an tibi in ami- 

P 



314 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



citiam aliquis recipiendus sit ; cum placuerit fieri, toto 
ilium pectore admitte. Tarn audacter cum illo loquere 
quam tecum. Tu quidem ita vive, ut nihil tibi committas, 
nisi quod committere etiam inimico possis ; sed quia inter- 
veniunt quaedam, quae consuetude- fecit arcana, cum amico 
omnes curas, omnes cogitationes tuas misce. Fidelem si 
putaveris, facies." 1 

He who is worthy of our confidence is worthy of our 
kindness ; and, therefore, of all the aid which our kindness 
can bestow. I need not say that we are guilty of a breach 
of duty, if, with the power of furthering his advancement 
in life, we withhold our assistance. If he be in want, we 
should consider it not as a favour on our part, but as an 
additional value which he has conferred on our wealth, that 
he has given us an opportunity of making a more delightful 
use of it than any to which we could have known how to 
apply it in any other circumstances. If he be in grief, we 
have an affection that knows how to diffuse a tender 
pleasure over sadness itself; and that, if it cannot overcome 
affliction, can thus at least alleviate it. If he be suffering 
unmerited ignominy, we have a heart that knows his 
innocence, and a voice that can make itself be heard, 
wherever virtue is allowed to speak. These duties are easy 
to be performed. The only duty which is not easy, but 
which is still more necessary than the others, is that which 
relates to moral imperfections that may truly arise in him, 
or may become visible in him, only after our friendship has 
been given and received; — imperfections which, slight as 
they may be at first, may, if suffered to continue, vitiate 
that whole character, which it is so delightful to us to love ; 
and which, in every important respect, is still so worthy of 
being loved. The correction of these is our chief duty; and 
every effort which it is in our power to use for this moral 
emendation, is to be employed sedulously, anxiously, 
urgently ; but with all the tenderness which such efforts 
* Seneca, Epkt. iii. 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. SI 5 

admit. If, in presenting to him that form of perfect virtue, 
to the imitation of which we wish to lead him, we make 
him feel more his own imperfection than the tenderness of 
that regard which seeks his amendment above every other 
object, the error is not his alone. 

The duty which leads us to seek the moral reformation 
of our friend, wherever we perceive an imperfection that 
requires to be removed, is, as I have said, the highest duty 
of friendship, because it is a duty that has for its object the 
highest good which it is in our power to confer ; and he 
who refrains from the necessary endeavour, because he fears 
to give pain to one whom he loves, is guilty of the same 
weakness which, in a case of bodily accident or disease, 
would withhold the salutary potion, because it is nauseous, 
or the surgical operation which is to preserve life, and to 
preserve it with comfort, because the use of the instrument, 
which is to be attended with relief and happiness, implies 
a little momentary addition of suffering. To abstain from 
every moral effort of this sort, in the mere fear of offending, 
is, from the selfishness of the motive, a still greater breach 
of duty, and almost, too, *a still greater weakness. He 
whom we truly offend by such gentle admonitions as friend- 
ship dictates, admonitions of which the chief authority is 
sought in the very excellence of him whom we wish to 
make still more excellent, is not worthy of the friendship 
which we have wasted on him ; and, if we thus lose his 
friendship, we are delivered from one who could not be 
sincere in his past professions of regard, and whose treachery, 
therefore, we might afterwards have had reason to lament. 
If he be worthy of us, he will not love us less, but love us 
more ; he will feel that we have done that which it was our 
duty to do : and we shall have the double gratification of 
witnessing the amendment which we desired, and of know- 
ing that we have contributed to an effect which was almost 
like the removal of a vice from ourselves, or a virtue added 
to our own moral character. 



316 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



The last set of duties, in relation to friendship, are those 
which regard its close. 

When friendship has been fixed where alone it should be 
fixed, the close of friendship is only the termination of the 
existence of those who feel it. But, w T ith all the caution 
which it is possible for the best and the wisest to employ in 
selection, it is still possible that they may be deceived, even 
as to important defects of character ; or, though they may 
not be deceived as to the essential virtues of the character, 
they may at least have failed to remark unfortunate cir- 
cumstances of temper or general disposition, which may 
frustrate afterwards all the care that can be used to avoid 
what might lead to irritations and fretful suspicions, incom- 
patible with permanent confidence. Friendship, then — 
that is to say, the cordial intimacy of friendship — may 
cease, while those still live who were its subjects ; but 
when it ceases, from causes that would render it impossible 
to be renewed with the same interest as before, or that 
would render the renewal of it unwise, even though it were 
possible, it should be a cessation of intimacy, and nothing 
more. The great duty of fidelity still remains; and, in 
some measure too, unless where there has been the provo- 
cation of injustice that cancels the past, because it shows 
the seeming affection of the past, even when affection was 
credited, to have been deceit, there remains still the duty 
■of an interest stronger than we should feel in the welfare of 
a stranger who had never been connected with us by any 
tie of peculiar regard. Even when there has been such a 
discovery of guilt, as would render immoral this remaining 
interest, the duty of fidelity, as I have said, remains in all 
its force. "What was confided to us in years of confidence, 
should still be as safe in our bosom as before. The only 
dispensation by which it can be morally allowable for us 
to violate the trust, is the slander of our reputation by the 
confider himself, if he dare to assail our character, when the 
disclosure of the secret which he has trusted to us, would 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 317 

render manifest our innocence. His very attack, in that 
case, may be considered as a sort of tacit intimation to us 
that his trust is at an end. 

When friendship, after continuing uninterrupted through 
life, not merely without diminution, but with perpetual 
accessions of confidence and happiness, is at last broken by 
the death of one of the parties, its duties do not terminate 
to the survivor. He has a source of new duties in the 
remembrances of the past, in the glory of his friend, 
which is ever present with him, and in the expectation 
of that future life in which he hopes to rejoin him, and 
which, by this very hope, presents a new motive to his own 
virtues. 

" Some persons," says the Marquise de Lambert, " be- 
lieve that there are no longer any duties to be fulfilled 
beyond the tomb ; and there are but few who know how 
to be friends to the dead. Though the most magnificent 
funeral pomp be the tears and the silent sorrow of those 
who survive, and the most honourable sepulture be in their 
hearts, we must not think that tears which are shed from 
the sensibility of the moment, and sometimes too from 
causes which, in part at least, relate to ourselves, acquit us 
of all our obligation. The name of our friends, their 
glory, their family, have still claims on our affection, 
which it would be guilt not to feel. They should live still 
in our heart by the emotions which subsist there ; in our 
memory, by our frequent remembrance of them; in our 
voice, by our eulogiums ; in our conduct by our imitation of 
their virtues." 1 

After our consideration of the duties of friendship, which 
necessarily involve in them many feelings of gratitude for 
kindnesses received, it cannot require any long discussion 
to convince you of the duty of gratitude to our benefactors 
in general. 



1 De St. Lambert, (Euvres, tome i. p. 248. 



318 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



It is one of the most pleasing proofs of the benevolence 
of Heaven, that the very production of good by one human 
being to another, is not attended with delight only to him 
who receives the favour, but with equal delight to him who 
confers it ; and with respect to the future also, that the 
desire of new beneficent exertions is not more deeply 
impressed on the mind of the beneficent, by every repetition 
of his kindness, than on the mind of him who is the object 
of the kindness. Both are made happier ; both are made 
more eager to render happy. Our first emotion, on receiving 
good, is love of him from whom we receive it ; our second 
emotion is the wish of being able to render to him some 
mutual service ; and he whose generous life is a continued 
diffusion of happiness, may thus delight himself with the 
thought that he has not diffused happiness only, but that 
in diffusing it he has been, at the same time, the diffuser of 
virtue, — at least, of wishes which were virtue for the time, 
and required nothing to convert tbem into beneficence, but 
the means of exercising them. 

So ready is gratitude to arise in almost every mind, that 
ingratitude to a benefactor, in every age of the world, has 
been regarded almost with the same species of abhorrence 
as the violation of the dearest duties of consanguinity itself. 
He who could plunge a dagger into the heart of one who 
had conferred on him any signal service, would be viewed 
by us almost with the same fearful astonishment with which 
we gaze on the parricide who plunged his dagger into the 
heart that gave him life. 

The tie which connects the benefactor with him on whom 
he has conferred a kindness, does not, however, give its whole 
duties to one party, though its principal duties belong to one. 
It is the duty of one, to love him from whom he has received 
important kindnesses, to study the interests of him by whom 
his own have been promoted, and in every service which 
requires only zeal, and not a sacrifice of virtue, to be 
assiduous in repaying what can be repaid, not from an eager 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



319 



wish to shake off the obligation, which is truly in itself a 
species of ingratitude, but from the sincere desire of 
increasing the happiness of one who is sincerely loved, and 
who has given so much reason to love him. 

These are the duties of the obliged. But though we are 
not much accustomed to think of the duties of benefactors, 
the obliger too has moral obligations to fulfil, and obliga- 
tions which, while they are as truly incumbent as the duties 
of the obliged, are far more difficult to be fulfilled ; the duty 
of making his benefits press as lightly as benefits to the 
same amount can press, by unfailing attentions to him 
whom he has obliged, — a condescension that makes itself 
felt, however, not as condescension which would recall the 
obligation more painfully, but only as kindness which seems 
to arise without any thought of former benefits, from the 
overflowing goodness of a benevolent heart. It would be 
manifestly cruel to repeat continually to any one, on whom 
we had conferred an important favour, " Eemember the 
favour which I conferred on you but since it is not in 
the direct words only that such a meaning can be conveyed, 
it is cruel also, by excessive and ill-placed forms of osten- 
tatious civility, to seem constantly to say to him, that we 
are thus very kind, and that we have never forgotten the 
generosity which we showed him, at the distance, perhaps, 
of many years. 

When a benefactor forgets his duties, and makes a cruel 
use of the favours which he may have conferred, there is 
no tyrant whose cruelty is more oppressive, because it is 
the tyranny of one whom we cannot oppose like other 
tyrants. They may, indeed, shackle our arms ; but the 
iron clasp of this moral oppressor is placed where it is most 
painfully felt, upon the heart itself, that may feel the worth- 
lessness, but that is deprived of all power of rising against 
it. There are beings of this kind who use the means of 
beneficence only for purposes the most malevolent, whose 
very gifts are snares ; who oblige, that they may after- 



520 



OF THE DUTIES OF FRIENDSHIP. 



wards be malicious with impunity, exacting ever after from 
their unfortunate victim, assiduities and services which it 
is miserable to pay, and rejoicing, if he fail in them, that 
they may have the still greater pleasure of proclaiming his 
ingratitude. 

" Ingratitude, indeed," as Rousseau justly observes, 
would be far rarer than it is, if the benefactor were less 
frequently a usurer. What has done us good, is dear to us, 
by the very sentiment of our nature. Ingratitude is not in 
the heart of man ; but interest is there : and the obliged 
who are ungrateful, are far fewer in number than the 
obligers, who are interested, and who have sold what they 
have only feigned to give. When is it," he continues, 
"that we see any one who is forgotten by his benefactor, 
forget him ? A benefactor who can thus forget, the obliged 
never fails to remember ; he speaks of him with pleasure, 
as he thinks of him with tenderness. If an opportunity 
occur in which he can show, by any unexpected service, 
that he remembers the service which was before conferred 
upon himself, with what internal delight does he then 
satisfy his gratitude, with what expression of joy does he 
make kiniself recognised, with what transport does he say, 
My turn is come ! Such is the genuine voice of nature. A 
kindness, that was truly a kindness, never yet found a 
bosom that was ungrateful." 1 

The expression, if it were meant to be understood strictly, 
would certainly be a little too strong ; since there may be 
ingratitude, even to the most generous, as there may be any 
other atrocious offence. But it is only in the bosoms of the 
most atrocious that such ingratitude can arise : and of this, 
at least, we may be sure, that the best preservative against 
a failure of duty on the part of the obliged, is for the obliger 
himself to fulfil all the duties of a benefactor. 



* Emile, liv. ir. CEuvres de Rousseau, tome vii. p. 50. Paris. I 



OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT. 



321 



LECTURE XVIII. 

OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT ; OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 

have now considered the nature of the duties which 
arise from our peculiar connexion with certain individuals, 
as our relatives in consanguinity or wedlock, our friends, 
our benefactors. There remain still to be considered by 
us two species of duties, that arise from connexions of a 
more general kind ; the duties of contract, which, of course, 
vary with the nature of our particular engagements : and 
the duties of citizenship, or of patriotic regard, which 
extend to all the individuals that are comprehended with 
us under one system of government. 

Though the practical rules of morality, which regard 
contracts, strictly as contracts, are all founded on the great 
principle, that each party in the contract is under a moral 
obligation to fulfil what he has undertaken to perform, in 
the manner in which he had reason to believe the engage- 
ment to be understood by the party with whom he con- 
tracted, it may be of advantage to consider, separately, the 
contracts which relate to objects of commercial barter, and 
those which relate to personal service. Even personal 
services, indeed, are truly objects of barter, as much as any 
of the articles of daily sale, of which we usually think when 
we speak of commerce ; but still there are so many other 
circumstances of moral influence connected with the con- 
tracts of service, that they may very fairly, at least the 
most important of them, which connects the master and the 
servant, and admits a stranger into the general system of 
domestic relationships, be regarded^ in ethics, as constituting 
a species apart. 

p 2 



S22 OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT. 

The command which mere barter gives us, even when 
the objects of the barter are present objects exchanged for 
present objects, is no slight accession to the comfort of 
mankind. What is useless to ourselves is thus instantly 
invested with utility, by becoming the medium of acquiring 
for us what is directly useful. But such direct barter, of 
present objects for present objects, would be only a small 
part of the commerce from which our wants might receive 
aid, if no more than the possessions of the present moment 
were allowed to enter into the mutual transference. We 
may have present wants, which the superfluities of others 
might gratify, though we may be, at present, without 
the possession of any thing which can purchase them 
as a fair equivalent ; and we may have this inability 
of present purchase, with the certainty, that we shall, at 
some period more or less near, have that which, if possessed 
by us now, would be gladly purchased from us, by the 
cession of those articles of use or luxury, which our wants 
of the moment require. A contract is truly, in its moral 
operation, such a transfer of the future for the present, or 
of some future object which we value less, for a future 
object which we value more. Its effect is to free us, in a 
great measure, from the influence of time, as far as our 
mere commerce is concerned ; to render every thing which 
our power, in any moment of our life, may command, 
present, as it were, at the very hour in which we make our 
purchase ; enabling us thus to form, of all the property 
which we are ever to possess, and of all the energies which 
we are ever to be capable of exerting, one great fund, which 
we may employ with equal and ready command, for all the 
purposes that seem to us, at any one moment, most essential 
to our happiness. 

If that power, by which we are thus enabled to bargain 
for the future, be so important an instrument of public 
oonvenience, the breach of the contracts, on the stability of 
which, that is to say, on the good faith of which, the power 



OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT. 



323 



is founded, we may well suppose, will be regarded by the 
community as an injury to its essential interests ; and the 
individual guilty of it, should feel, not merely the self- 
disapprobation which arises from the thought of having 
deceived, for purposes of selfish profit, any one member of 
the community, but that also which arises from the thought 
of having contributed to weaken the great support of public 
confidence, and to reduce the whole power of society to 
those few exertions which it is capable of making at any 
one instant, or the few immediate objects of barter which 
are at any one instant absolutely possessed. 

Of that most useful power, which the general system of 
contracts gives us over time itself, he does all which an 
individual can do to deprive us ; for he does that which, if 
all other individuals did in like manner, the power of 
bargaining for the future, which exists only by mutual 
confidence, would cease instantly in mutual distrust. From 
a command over every moment of our life, we should be 
reduced to a single moment of it, the moment in which 
we could give with one hand, while we received with the 
other. 

Man, therefore, is morally bound to perform the engage- 
ments which he has undertaken to fulfil, whether there be 
or be not, in the individual with whom the contract was 
made, any power of enforcing the fulfilment. To this 
obligation, where it has been voluntarily made, there are 
truly no limits but the physical power of the individual, 
and the independent morality of that which is undertaken 
to be performed. Where we have undertaken to perform 
what no exertions on our part, however active and unre- 
mitting, could accomplish, we cannot feel remorse at not 
having done what we were unable to do ; whatever moral 
disapprobation we may feel of our engagement itself, as 
undertaken rashly, and as tending to excite expectations 
in others, which, as they were beyond our power of 



324 



OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT. 



gratifying them, we had no title to excite. In like manner, 
when the action which we have undertaken to perform is 
one which, as affecting the happiness or means of happiness 
of others whose happiness we have no title to disturb, it 
would be immoral in us to perform, if we had not entered 
into the engagement, the performance of it would be 
immoral still, though we may have entered into the most 
solemn engagement ; for there is no form of words, no 
promise, no oath, which can render just, what was injustice 
to others before. In such a case it cannot excite our 
remorse, that we have not done what it would be remorse 
to have done : our moral disapprobation of ourselves may 
arise indeed, and should arise ; but it arises at the remem- 
brance of the engagement itself, not at the thought of the 
failure in the engagement. We have now to regret one 
delinquency. But if we had performed what we had 
engaged to do, we should then, instead of one species of 
moral regret, have been subject to two feelings of that sort. 
"We should have had to repent, as now, of the guilt of 
engaging to do what was morally wrong, and to repent also 
of the continued guilt of wilfully persisting in an action 
which we feel to be iniquitous. 

When that which we have engaged to do is truly within 
our power, when it is undertaken voluntarily, and when 
the performance involves no violation of moral duty, it 
would be a violation of moral duty not to perform it ; or, 
though perhaps with more verbal exactness, to perform it 
less fully than we know to have been understood and 
intended, in the spirit of the mutual convention. The 
contract may, indeed, if we consider the mere words of it, 
often imply more or less than was understood by the parties 
at the time ; and though, in some cases, it may be legally 
expedient, for the advantage of the general rule, as 
applicable to cases in which the discovery of the intended 
meaning would not be easy, and in which, notwithstanding, 



OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT. 



325 



it is necessary that some exact meaning should be presumed, 
— that that meaning should be presumed to be what the 
strict grammatical or technical construction of the language 
bears, — it is legally only, not morally, that this forced 
interpretation in the particular case is put on words which, 
in that particular case, were intended to convey a different 
sense ; and he who, with perfect certainty of the intended 
meaning, shelters himself under the mere forms of legal 
construction, and does only what the law, in its necessary 
limitation to general rules and general forms of expression, 
obliges him to do, is, in every important respect, as truly a 
violator of the duty of contract, as if the construction of the 
law had exactly corresponded with that real meaning of 
the parties at the time of their mutual engagement, which, 
after entering into the engagement, he has refused to fulfil. 

The contract of personal service, even of that domestic 
service which is the most complete of all voluntary 
servitudes, is, I have said, as a mere contract, precisely of 
the same nature as our other contracts. The servant who 
engages to obey the will of the master, that is to say, of 
one who, on his part, engages to furnish the servant with 
maintenance, and a pecuniary remuneration corresponding 
with the nature of the services performed, makes a barter 
of -advantage for advantage. He gives up his liberty, for 
the time bargained, to receive, in return, what he values 
still more than liberty. 

That the master and the servant are mutually bound to 
discharge to each other the peculiar offices which they have 
engaged to discharge, is a moral truth which flows from the 
very nature of a contract, and which needs no peculiar 
elucidation. But as, in the fulfilment of this particular 
contract, individuals are brought together who may be 
mutually benefited, in various ways, which the contract 
itself cannot strictly be understood as comprehending, and 
benefited, without injury to him who confers the benefit, 



326 



OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT 



nature has not allowed this power of doing good to be 
wasted in unproductive idleness. 

By various beautiful processes which take place in the 
mechanism of the moral universe, — by the influence of the 
associating principle, aud by all those emotions of regard 
which the presence of familiar objects, merely as familiar 
objects, excites, — still more by that moral esteem, which it 
is impossible not to feel for the virtues that are frequently 
before us, whatever the rank may be which those virtues 
adorn, she has provided a source of peculiar duties, which 
make man, who lives with man, in the intercourse of mutual 
services, an object of a deeper interest than that which 
begins and ends with the few services which were recipro- 
cally bartered. 

That it is the duty of the servant, independently of the 
cold fulfilment of the mere drudgery which he executes for 
us — as he would have executed it for any other who paid 
the same price for each motion of his arm — to feel, too, 
some interest in our prosperity and general happiness ; in 
our sickness, for example, not merely to watch around our 
bed, and to wish for his own sake that we were again 
enjoying health and easy slumbers as before, but to form 
that wish with sincere regret for the parched lip, and 
burning eye, and the feverish lassitude, that robs us of rest, 
even in rendering us incapable of action ; that he should 
rejoice at our recovery, before he thinks that our recovery 
will restore him to the less fatiguing duties that are 
comparatively freedom ; all this, though it formed no part 
of our original contract with him, we are sufficiently ready 
to claim, or at least to expect, because the duties of 
affection which we claim are duties which are to be 
profitable to ourselves. We are not quite so ready to 
admit, however, that our own duties to him are more than 
those for which we directly contracted, and that, without 
violating the obligation which the law would discover in 



RELATING TO PERSONAL SERVICE. 



327 



the very words or implied conditions of our bargain, we 
may yet violate the moral obligation which truly subsists 
in it, according to that only just interpretation which our 
own hearts, if we consulted them, would afford. 

There are duties, then, which we owe to the lowest of 
those who serve us, that are not fulfilled by the most 
bountiful allotment of wages, and lodging, and sustenance. 

Of these duties, which are not duties of supererogation, but 
flow from the very nature of the bond which connects the 
master and the servant by reciprocal benefits, the surest 
rule is to be found in that brief direction, which Seneca, in 
the spirit of the noble Christian precept of morals, has so 
happily given us in one of his Epistles, in which he treats 
of the cruelty and the contumely of Roman masters. " So 
live with your inferior, as you would wish your superior 
to live with you. Sic cum inferiore vivas, quemadmodum 
tecum superiorem velles vivere." — " In a servant," says 
Marivaux, " I see a man ; in his master I see nothing more, 
Every one has his office to perform ; one serves at the table, 
one serves at the bar, one in the council, another in the 
field ; and he whom we call a servant, is perhaps the least 
a servant of the whole band of menials." 

Those who serve us, it is impossible even for the haugh- 
tiest pride to deny, are indeed men like ourselves, differing 
from us, originally at least, only in the circumstances of 
their external condition, and differing, even in these, only 
for a period, that, in relation to the immortality of which it 
is a part, is scarcely more lasting than that short voluntary 
transformation of character, in which, for the amusement 
of a few hours, the richest and mightiest sometimes con- 
descend to assume a servile garb, and act the part which 
their servants on the stage of life are acting in a drama a 
very little longer. They are masquers, whose masquerade 
does not finish in an evening ; but will finish when a few 
evenings are over, and when all will return to their original 
state of man. But without insisting on this similarity of 



S28 



OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT 



state, the human equality which is soon to level the distinc- 
tions that at present are regarded by us with so much pride, 
it will be enough to insist on the similarity of the principles 
on which their feelings and ours depend. They are capable, 
like us, of many pleasures, and of more than pleasure in 
receiving approbation : they have passions that mislead 
them as we have, and from us those passions may derive 
mitigation, or additional violence. On these considerations 
our duties to them are founded. 

They are capable of enjoyment like ourselves ; and there 
are many enjoyments of which we may legally deprive 
them, by the constraints to which they have submitted 
themselves, according to the common usage of such personal 
contracts ; but which are not incompatible with the fulfil- 
ment of all their duties to us ; and which it would there- 
fore, morally, be as wrong to prevent, as it would be to 
prevent a similar amount of enjoyment, when the power 
of preventing it was not legally ours. He who, to the ut- 
most of his power, converts the freedom of domestic service 
into slavery, who allows no liberty, no recreation, no plea- 
sure which he can interdict, has all the guilt of a tyrannical 
master of a slave ; or rather, has a guilt that exceeds the 
guilt of such oppression, because it is an oppression that is 
exercised in a land of freemen. Every indulgence, there- 
fore, which does not interfere with the domestic duties, and 
which does not tend to vitiate the character, is a duty which 
the master owes. 

As beings capable of pleasure, then, servants are to us 
the objects of this duty of reasonable indulgence. There is 
a certain moral pleasure, however, which we particularly 
owe to them. 

They may do well ; and in doing well, they have the 
same title to our praise which our best actions have to the 
glory with which we expect the world to be ready to re- 
ward us. If we withhold the approbation which is due, 
we take from them one powerful incentive to continuance 



RELATING TO PERSONAL SERVICE. 



S29 



of that species of conduct which rendered them worthy of 
approbation ; and, at the same time, we take from them 
one of the most delightful feelings of which he who has 
sold his freedom is still capable — the feeling, that he has 
done something, which was not actually sold with the very 
labour of his hands — that in the additional duties performed 
by him, he has been free still — and that our praise is some- 
thing, which, as it was not an actual condition, like the 
livery and the daily bread, is an offering to his own gra- 
tuitous virtue. 

The duty of approbation, then, when approbation is due, 
is another of the duties which the master owes to the ser- 
vant, and a duty which, though he may legally withhold it, 
he is not entitled morally to withhold. 

But servants, as I have said, share not our love of praise 
only, but passions of a less commendable kind. They are 
assailed by temptations like those which assail us ; and 
they sometimes fall as we too fall. They neglect to do 
what we have desired ; and they often do what is positively 
injurious to us. In such cases, they might deserve all our 
severity of punishment, if we were not men, and they were 
not men. Our reproof they unquestionably deserve, not 
merely because they have failed in their part of our mutual 
contract, but also because our reproof may, even to them, 
be attended with moral advantage. Yet though our re- 
proof of any gross inattention is not excusable only, but if 
we consider all its consequences, an act of humanity, it is 
not to be the reproof of one who seems almost pleased with 
the offence itself in the eagerness which is shown to repre- 
hend it. In censuring, we are silently to have in mind the 
human weaknesses of our own moral nature ; and to remem- 
ber, that if even we, with better light and nobler recrea- 
tions, err, the ignorant, who, by their very ignorance, are 
incapable of seeing many of the consequences of actions, 
and who have few recreations but those which seduce them 
from what is good, may still more naturally be imagined to 



330 



OF THE DUTIES OF CONTRACT 



err. In condemning them, therefore, we condemn our- 
selves ; or we declare that we are frail creatures, of whom 
less knowledge and less virtue are to be expected than of 
them. There are beings with gentle voices, and still 
gentler eyes ; with smiles that seem never to be willed, and 
scarcely even to fade and brighten again, but to be almost 
the native character of the countenance, like the very lustre 
that is ever blooming on the cheek and on the lip, — there 
are beings who seem to exist thus only in a perpetual moral 
atmosphere of radiance and serenity, that, on the sight of a 
single particle of dust on a book, or a table, or a chair, as 
if in that particle a whole mountain of misery were before 
them, can assume in an instant all the frowns and thunders 
of all the furies ; whose delicate frame is too weak to bear 
the violent opening of a door, but not too weak, after the 
door is opened, to shake the very floor with the violence of 
their own wrath on the unfortunate opener of it. 

Indulgence to the lighter imperfections of servants is 
then an important part of our moral obligation in that 
temporary domestic relationship which we have contracted. 
But, though it is a duty which we owe to them, it is at 
least as much a source of tranquillity to ourselves. A life 
of constant upbraiding is very far from being a life of hap- 
piness. When we make them miserable, they have had 
already too good a revenge in the very fretfulness of the 
anger that is wreaked on them. 

If the mere human tendency to evil that exists in the 
bosom of the servant, as it exists in his masters bosom, be 
a sufficient cause for the duty of indulgence, when indul- 
gence would not be attended with hurtful consequences, as 
much to him whose offences are suffered to pass unrebuked, 
as to him who is directly injured ; this tendency to evil is 
a source also of another duty, which is, in truth, the most 
important of all the duties that attend this domestic rela- 
tion ; the duty of not corrupting the virtue of him whose 
services only we have purchased ; and whose moral part, 



RELATING TO PERSONAL SERVICE. 



331 



which was not, and could not be sold to us, we are not to 
enfeeble, if we do not strengthen it. He who, after living 
under the same roof with us for years, quits our door with- 
out the amiable qualities with which he first entered it, — 
every pure wish polluted, and new habits of licentiousness 
formed, while all that remains of early habits is a little 
remorse that is soon overwhelmed in the turbulence of vul- 
gar dissipation, though he may be far better skilled than 
before in all the fashionable frivolities of his craft, and 
though he may have acquired, in our service, by plunder, 
not by economy, what would enable him to rise to a better 
station, if it were not soon to be exhausted by the vices 
which he gathered at the same time, quits us poorer upon 
the whole, and, as a mere human being, far lower in the 
scale of dignity than when, with all his clownish awkward- 
ness, he had virtues which it has been our misfortune, or 
rather our guilt, to destroy. 

The only remaining set of duties to particular individuals 
or classes of individuals which we have to consider, are 
those which connect us with our fellow-citizens. 

That we should love the land of our birth, of our happi- 
ness, of that social system under which our happiness has 
been produced and protected, the land of our ancestors, of 
all the great names and great deeds which we have been 
taught most early to venerate, is surely as little wonderful 
as that we should feel, what we all truly feel, a sort of 
affection for the most trifling object which we have merely 
borne about with us for any length of time. Loving the 
very land of our birth, we love those who inhabit it, who 
are to us a part as it were of the land itself, and the part 
which brings it most immediately home to our affection and 
services. It is a greater recommendation to our good will, 
indeed, to be a relative, or a friend, or a benefactor ; but it 
is no slight recommendation, even without any of these 
powerful titles, to be a fellow-countryman, to have breathed 
the same air, and trod the same soil, and lent vigour to the 



332 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



same political institutions, to which our own aid has actively 
or passively contributed. While all are fellow-citizens 
around us, indeed, we scarcely feel the force of the tie 
which binds us to each, because we are bound equally to 
all. But, let our relative situation be changed : place us 
on some shore at a distance, in a society as civilized as that 
which we have left, with a brighter sky and warmer air, 
and all the occupations which business can give, or all the 
amusements with which elegant frivolity can render days 
and evenings short to us ; — in the very hurry of pleasure, 
that scarcely allows us time to think of home, let but a 
single accent be heard of the native dialect familiar to our 
ear : and, if we have been long absent from our country, 
what benefactor or friend is there, or almost I may say, 
what relative, however near to us in consanguinity and 
affection, who is for the moment or the hour so interesting 
to our heart as the stranger of whom we know nothing, but 
that he comes from the land which we love above every 
other land, and is to us almost the representative of that 
land itself ? 

Affection, though not the direct and exclusive source, is 
at least, by the bountiful provision of Heaven, the great 
accompaniment of duty ; and where affection so strong is 
universally felt, there must be duties of no slight obligation. 

Our countrymen may be considered by us individually, 
or as constituting oue great community, in which the 
obligations due by us to all the separate individuals are 
concentered, so as to form together an amount of obligation 
which those who would think but little of their duties to a 
single member of the community, cannot, with all their 
indifference, wholly disregard. 

As individuals, their claim to our services is the same in 
kind, however weaker in degree, as that which a common 
descent gives to those who are connected with us by remote 
affinities of blood. TVe are not merely to abstain from 
injuring, and to wish and endeavour to promote their happi- 



OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS. SS3 

ness when means of promoting it are in our power ; for 
these duties we owe to all mankind ; but when there is a 
competition of interests, and no obligations of more im- 
portant duty are concerned, which should influence our 
choice, we are to prefer them to others who compete with 
them, our country being to us as it were a parent, and they, 
with us, its common offspring. 

Beside this general interest in the happiness of all who 
live with us under the same government, — an interest in 
which you perceive the same beautiful relation of our affec- 
tions to our means of readiest and most frequent usefulness., 
which we have traced in all the other species of peculiar 
regard, — there are patriotic duties which we owe to some 
of our countrymen only ; though, in truth, when we trace 
even these duties to their source, we find them too to have 
their origin in that equal regard for the happiness of all, 
which we owe to ail our fellow- citizens. The duties to 
which I allude are the offices of external respect which we 
pay to those who are invested with high stations ; offices of 
respect which the multitude pay, without any very nice 
analysis of the obligation, and which it is of the highest 
importance to public order, and therefore to public happi- 
ness, that they should be ready thus to yield to the exter- 
nal symbols of authority ; and which a wise and good man 
pays with the same readiness as the multitude, because he 
knows at once how important they are to national tranquil- 
lity, and how very little it is which, in the external forms 
of respect, is paid to the real happiness of the individual. 

Such are the civic duties which we owe to individuals. 
The duties which we owe to our fellow-citizens, as consti- 
tuting one great community, may be considered as reducible 
to three : first, the duty of obedience to the system of laws 
under which we live, the benefit of which all enjoy, and 
according to which all regulate their plaus and expectations ; 
secondly, the duty of defending that social system of which 
we are a part, from violent aggressions, foreign or internal ; 



334 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



and, thirdly, the duty of endeavouring, as far as we possess 
any power that can be beneficially exerted, to increase the 
means of public prosperity ; and above all, where political 
evils exist, to ameliorate a system of polity, which, though 
it produce much happiness, may still, by reformations, as 
far as these are practicable, be capable of producing more. 

Our first patriotic duty of this general kind, is the duty 
of obedience. 

Why is it that we term obedience a duty? what circum- 
stances are there in the nature of a system of government, 
by which, under certain limitations, it has a claim to our 
submission, merely because it already exists and has long 
existed ? 

The answer to this question was, for a long time, even in 
our own land, a very simple one, — that power established 
was established by God, and that disobedience to the in- 
dividual whom he had established to exercise this power, 
would be a rebellion against right divine. 

Who first taught souls enslaved, and realms undone, 

The enormous faith of many made for one ; 

That proud exception to all Nature's laws, 

To invert the world, and counterwork its cause ? 

Force first made conquest, and that conquest law, 

Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe, 

Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid, 

And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made. 1 

The argument for the right divine of established power, 
which is in logic little better than any other argument for 
the right divine of any thing that exists, whether good or 
evil, merely as existing, — for the prevalent system of man- 
ners, virtuous or vicious, or even, as has been truly said, 
for the right divine of a wide-spread fever or any other 
pestilence, — is as wretched in its moral consequences, as it 
is ridiculous in logic ; and it is painful to peruse the writ- 



1 Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. iii. 241-248. 



OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS. 



335 



ings on the subject which at one period, and that not a very 
distant one, were so prevalent, and in some cases were the 
works of authors whom we are accustomed to venerate, not 
merely as philosophers, but as men who have given un- 
doubted proofs of the most benevolent interest in the 
human race. Berkeley, the author of the " Theory of 
Yision," — Berkeley, the generous possessor of u every 
virtue under heaven," is the same Berkeley who endeavours 
to demonstrate to us, that it is as much our duty to submit 
to the most ferocious tyrant as to submit to the supreme 
benevolence of God ; or rather, that to obey such a tyrant 
is to obey Supreme Benevolence. 

That God, the equal God of all mankind, has not formed 
us to be the slaves of any one individual, and in furnishing 
our minds with so many principles that ensure our progress 
in less important sciences, has not abandoned us, in the 
most important of all, to the selfishness of a power which 
may prefer the present misery of its own despotic sway to 
all that can be offered for its reformation, because the 
reformation would abridge an authority which it is more 
convenient for the possessor of it to exercise with no limit 
but that of will, I surely need not now attempt to prove to 
you. On the right divine of authority, whatever vague 
allusions to it we may sometimes find in courtly flatterers 
of the day, we have no writers now who require to be con- 
futed. 

There is, indeed, one species of right divine which esta- 
blished authority does possess, — its tendency to the peace 
of those who submit to it, and, consequently, in that respect 
to their happiness, which, as the object of our Creator, has 
the sanction of divine will. But it possesses this right 
divine, only as tending to public happiness ; it is secondary 
only, not primary : and when the public happiness, instead 
of being, upon the whole, promoted by obedience, would, 
upon the whole, when every consequence, indirect as well 
as direct, is taken into account, be promoted, by shaking 



336 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



off that power which is inconsistent with its great object, 
remonstrance, even rebellion itself, — if that name can justly 
be given in such circumstances of dreadful necessity to the 
expression of the public will, — has as truly its right divine, 
as established authority, even in its best state, could be said 
to have it, when, as exercised with happier tendencies, it 
was productive of that good in which alone the divinity of 
its right is to be found. 

We have no need, then, of all those fictions to which 
political writers, in periods in which the true source of 
political obligation was less distinctly perceived, were 
obliged to have recourse, in asserting the rights of the 
governed, as paramount to the claims of mere possession in 
the tyrannical governor. We have no need to speak of 
original compacts of those who obey with those who 
command, understood as prior to the existing forms of 
social institutions, and the violation of which by one party 
might be considered as a warrant to the other party for 
resuming the original rights of which they had consented, 
through their ancestors, to divest themselves. Such com- 
pacts never existed, and could not, independently of the 
good that might flow from them, be of obligation on the 
new individuals who form the present race of mankind, 
though they had truly taken place at some remote period. 
The only reason for which we could conceive it necessary 
for men at present to pay the obedience which another 
number of men, at any other period, paid to a certain 
number of their fellow-creatures who lived in their time, 
is, that a failure in this obedience, of the propriety of which 
the existing generation are equally capable of judging, or 
better capable, if political knowledge have made the 
slightest progress, would seem to be injurious to the society 
in which they live ; and if this reason be valid, it is valid 
without the necessity of the compact supposed. It is our 
duty to obey, because mankind, at least that large part of 
mankind which we term our country, would suffer, upon 



OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS. 337 

the whole, if we were not to obey. This is the powerful 
hold which even imperfect governments possess on the 
obedience of the wise and good ; and the stronger holds 
which they may seem to have, by corruption, or by mere 
usage of unreflecting veneration, on the profligate and the 
ignorant, is truly not half so strong. The profligate 
supporter of a system, for which he cares only as it ministers 
to his vices, may see perhaps some more tempting promise 
of wealth and power in a rebellion against that very 
authority, the slightest attempt to ameliorate which he has 
been accustomed to represent as a species of treason. The 
ignorant, who fall on their knees to-day, merely because 
something is passing which is very magnificent, and before 
which other knees are bent or bending, may, to-morrow, 
when other arms are lifted in tumultuous rebellion, join their 
arms to the tumult and the dreadful fury of the day. It is 
only in the bosom of the wise and good, as I have said, 
that any security of obedience is to be found. He who is 
worthy of those honourable names, who is wise to consult 
for the public weal, which his goodness wishes, has no 
object but the happiness of the community ; and though he 
may see imperfections in government which tend to lessen 
this happiness, he yet knows how much is to be hoped from 
the calm influence of diffusive knowledge, and how very 
little is to be hoped from the exercise of force, which would 
be opposed not by mere force of arms, but by the force of 
as many bad passions as could be summoned to resist it ; 
and which would too often, also, be obliged to call to its 
own aid passions, as little worthy of the sacred cause in 
which they might be engaged, as the very passions that' 
were opposed to him. He weighs good with good, evil 
with evil ; and the oppression must indeed be severe, and the 
prospect of relief from it by other means be truly gloomy, 
before he will lift his voice to call his fellow-citizens to arm 
against their fellow-citizens. " The speculative line of 
demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and resistance 

Q 



S38 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



must begin, is," as Mr. Burke truly says, " faint, obscure, 
and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single 
event, which determines it. Governments must be abused 
and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of ; and the 
prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of 
the past. When things are in that lamentable condition, 
the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those 
whom nature has qualified to administer, in extremities, 
this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered state. 
Times, and occasions, and provocations, will teach their 
own lessons. The wise will determine from the gravity 
of the case ; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression ; 
the high-minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive 
power in unworthy hands ; the brave and bold, from the 
love of honourable danger in a generous cause ; — but, with 
or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource 
of the thinking and the good." 1 

A revolution, indeed, even in such circumstances, as this 
eloquent writer well says, should be, and will be, the last 
resource of the thinking and good. But, though it will be 
the last resource, it still is a resource ; a resource in those 
miserable circumstances, in which times, and occasions, and 
provocations, teach their terrible lesson. When the rare 
imperious cases do occur, in which the patriotism that before 
made obedience a duty, allows it no more, to him who feels 
that he has now another duty to perform, — when he sees, 
with sorrow, that a cause which is good in itself, will 
demand the use of means from which, with any other 
motives, he would have shrunk with abhorrence, he will 
lift his voice, sadly indeed, but still loudly, — he will lift 
his arm with reluctance, but, when it is lifted, he will 
wield it with all the force which the thought of the happi- 
ness of the world, as perhaps dependent on it, can give to 
its original vigour ; he has made that calculation in which 



1 Burke's Works, yol. v. p. 73. Lond. 1803, 8vo. 



OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS. 



339 



his own happiness and his own life have scarcely been 
counted as elements. If he survive and prevail, therefore, 
though in anticipating the prosperity which he has in part 
produced, he may sometimes look back on the past with 
melancholy, he cannot look back on it with regret ; and if 
he fall, he will think only of the aid which his life might 
have given to that general happiness which he sought, — not 
of his life itself, as an object of regard, or even as a thing 
which it would have been possible for him to preserve. 



LECTURE XIX. 

OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP — OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS — DEFENDING 
OUR COUNTRY — AUGMENTING THE GENERAL HAPPINESS. 

In the close of my last Lecture, I had begun the con- 
sideration of those duties which we owe to the community 
of our fellow-citizens, the duties understood as comprehended 
under the single term patriotism. 

These duties of man, as a citizen, are considered as 
referable to three heads ; first, the duty of obedience to the 
particular system of laws underwhich he may live; second!}', 
the duty of defending the social system under which he lives, 
from every species of violent aggression ; and, thirdly, the 
duty of increasing, to the best of his power, the means 
of public happiness in the nation, by every aid which he 
can give to its external or internal resources, and especially 
as the most important of all ends, by every amelioration 
which it can be nationally prudent to attempt, of any 
existing evils, in its laws and general forms of polity. 

In examining the first of these duties, we were, of course, 
led to inquire into the nature of that principle, from which 
existing institutions derive a moral authority. Of the 



340 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



divine right, to which it was long the easy and courtly 
practice of almost all the writers on this subject, to refer 
what, as divinely constituted, was therefore, they contended, 
to be deemed sacred from all human interference of the 
governed, as truly sacred as religion itself, I did not think 
it necessary to occupy your time with any long and serious 
confutation. "The right divine of kings to govern wrong," 
cannot be a right derived from the Divinity. He who 
attached the delightful feeling of moral approbation to every 
wish of diffusing happiness, cannot give the sanction of his 
own pure authority to crimes which, as established, have 
nothing to distinguish them from other crimes that have 
not been established, except that their atrocious oppression 
has been more lastingly and extensively injurious. "When 
a whole nation is bowed down in misery and intellectual 
and moral darkness, which, by the length of its uniform 
and dreary continuance, marks only what principles it 
contains of a servitude that may be perpetuated for ages as 
uniformly wretched, if a single effort, the elevation of a 
single standard, the utterance of a single word, were all 
which was necessary to give to millions that exist, and 
millions of millions that are afterwards to exist, not the 
happiness of freedom only, but with freedom all that light 
of thought and purity of generous devotion, which liberty 
never fails to carry along with it ; would it indeed be 
virtue to keep down that standard, to refrain from uttering 
that word so productive, and rather to say calmly to the 
world, be miserable still ? The God who is the God of 
happiness and truth and virtue, could not surely, in such 
circumstances, have made it guilt in the patriot to wish the 
single effort made ; or guilt in him, if he wish it made, to 
give his own heart, and arm, or voice, to that effort which 
he wished. 

It is vain for us, when our object is to discover, not what 
man has done, but what man ought to do, to think of the 
origin of power, as if this were sufficient to determine the 



OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS. 



341 



duty of our present acquiescence. Where all were not 
equal in every physical energy, one individual must soon 
have begun to exercise authority over other individuals. If 
we consider a number of children at play, where all may at 
first have the appearance of the most complete equality, we 
shall soon be able to discover how the stronger, in any 
period of life, or in any circumstances of society, might, in 
some cases, assume dominion which, in some other cases, 
might be given to superior skill. But, in whatever way 
power may have begun among mankind, it has usually, at 
least for many ages, in countries that suffer under despotism, 
been perpetuated by the submission on the part of the slave 
to the mere might of its hereditary or casual possessors : the 
history of power is, therefore, the history of that to which 
men have, generally or individually, considered it expedient 
to submit ; but it is not on that account necessarily the 
history of that to which it was the duty of man to submit. 
It leaves to the race of man, in every age, and in all the 
varying circumstances of their external and internal condi- 
tion, to consider the duties of mankind in the same manner 
as they would have considered them in any former age ; 
and the duty of man as a citizen, is not to prefer the happi- 
ness or supposed happiness of one to the happiness or sup- 
posed happiness of many, but the happiness of many to the 
happiness of one, when these are opposed and incompatible. 
The happiness of many may, indeed, be best consulted, and 
truly is best consulted, by distinctions and honours, which 
may seem to the inconsiderate as if existing only for the 
happiness of one or of a few. But still it is of the wider 
happiness produced by them which the patriot is to think, 
when he establishes these very distinctions, or wishes them 
to be prolonged. 

It is vain, then, to have recourse to any fictions to prove 
the duty either of obeying the sovereign power of the state 
in ordinary circumstances, or, in rare and unfortunate cir- 
cumstances, of occasional resistance to it ; since these duties 



342 OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



must always be reducible to the paramount obligation on the 
citizen, to consult the good, not of a few of his fellow-citizens, 
but of all, or the greater number ; an obligation without 
which the fiction would be worse than absurd, and with 
which it is unnecessary. 

The theory of a social contract, of the governed and their 
governers, for example, in which certain rights were sup- 
posed to be abandoned for certain purposes of general 
advantage, we found to be, even when considered as a 
mere fiction, (and it is only as a mere poetic fiction that it 
can be considered,) but an awkward circuitous mode of 
arriving at a truth, without the previous belief of which, 
the very contract supposed would be absolutely nugatory. 
It assumes, in this contract, original rights of the community, 
which, but for the contract, it would have been unjust in 
the governors to arrogate to themselves ; and if these be 
assumed as inherent in the very nature of man, indepen- 
dently of all social institutions, we must still, as men, have 
the rights which mankind, simply as mankind, originally 
possessed. The feigned contract adds nothing, it presup- 
poses every thing. The power which we obey, is a power 
which exists by our will, as much as the power which 
our earliest ancestors obeyed, existed only by the will of 
the subjects, who at once formed it, and gave it their 
obedience. 

The fiction of a social contract, then, as I have before 
said, is only a circuitous mode of asserting the original 
rights, which that very contract takes for granted in the 
contractors. Equally false is the supposed analogy, by 
which some political writers would argue, from mere pre- 
scription in cases of property, for a similar prescriptive 
right to sovereign power, as implied in the long-continued 
possession of it. There still remains the inquiry, why pre- 
scription itself is legally recognised. It is for the good of 
the state, and only for the general good, to prevent the 
evil of insecure possession, and frequent litigation, that such 



OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS. 



343 



a bar to judicial scrutiny is allowed ; and if it were for the 
good of all the citizens, that prescription should not 
operate, even in cases of property, there can be little doubt 
that it would not have been legally established. The legal 
authority of prescription, then, when we trace it to its 
source, is not a proof of the moral right of the exerciser of 
hereditary tyranny, to continued violation of public happi- 
ness, and therefore, to unlimited submission, from the 
nation of slaves, the offspring of a nation of slaves. It is, 
on the contrary, a proof of the paramount obligation of that 
general good, which in the right of prescription, as in 
every other legal right, has been professedly the great 
object of legislation, and which, in some circumstances, 
may render resistance a duty, as, in the ordinary circum- 
stances of society, it renders obedience a duty, and resis- 
tance a crime. 

That the power of the sovereign exists by our will, how- 
ever, is not enough of itself to confer on us the right of dis- 
obeying it; and this, for a very plain reason, that, even 
when the government obeyed is not, like that of our own 
noble constitution, one which is a source of greater happi- 
ness to him who obeys than to him who governs, the dis- 
obedience may be productive of misery, which even the 
slave of a bad government has no right to produce. Our 
duties are not all dependent on our mere power or our mere 
will. If I learn that my benefactor is in indigence, it 
depends on my will whether I afford any relief to his 
wants ; but it does not therefore follow that I have a moral 
right to refuse relief. In like manner, I have no moral 
right to produce that wild disorder, which mere disobedience 
to law, if general, would occasion ; still less to produce the 
bloodshed and the desolation, and the bad passions, worse 
than mere bloodshed and desolation, which would be the 
inevitable consequence of long-protracted civil dissensions. 
This general tendency of obedience to power and happiness 
is, as I remarked in my last Lecture, the true right divine 



344 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



of authority ; a right which is divine, because the virtue 
which loves the peace and happiness of all is itself of divine 
obligation. 

Since the duty of political obedience, however, important 
as it is in the list of moral duties, is still a duty which 
derives its force from our general regard for the happiness 
of the community, this happiness of the community, which, 
in ordinary circumstances, gives obligation to the claim of 
mere power to our obedience, in other circumstances limits 
the obligation, and produces a moral duty that is altogether 
opposite. On the duties of the citizen, in circumstances so 
different from those in which our inestimable constitution 
has placed us, we may still ethically speculate, as in 
our systems of meteorology we treat, under our own tem- 
perate sky, of the sultry heats and hurricanes of a tropical 
climate. 

The cases, however, in which it is morally right to resist, 
by other means than those which the established constitu- 
tion itself affords, the tyranny of a government, are, in any 
situation of society, but of rare occurrence ; since it is not 
tyranny alone which justifies rebellion, but tyranny in cir- 
cumstances in which rebellion against its cruel and degrad- 
ing power affords a prospect of success, not merely in the 
removal of a single tyrant, but in the establishment of a 
happier system. In every insurrection against the most 
cruel despot, a certain quantity of evil must be produced ; 
and the evil is sure, while the good that is hoped is doubt- 
ful. If the insurrection fail, the evil is produced, and pro- 
duced without any compensation, or rather, perhaps, serves 
only to render oppression more severe, and the hearts of 
the oppressed more fearful. The tyrant, after he has 
crushed all the little virtue that existed within the sphere 
of his dark dominion, may do, in the insolence of his 
triumph, what before he would have feared to do ; he may 
destroy at once what, by a little longer continuance, could 
scarcely have failed to diffuse a wider virtue, which his 



OBEDIENCE TO THE LAWS. 



345 



efforts would have beeii powerless to crush. The increased 
severity of the oppression, then, is one evil of such unsuc- 
cessful attempts ; and it is not less an evil, that they render 
for ever after, as I have said, the oppressed more fearful. 
The image of past defeat rises with an enfeebling influence 
on those who otherwise would have lifted a far stronger 
arm ; while the remembrance of the treacheries which pro- 
bably attended that defeat, and sometimes of the treacheries 
of those whose enthusiasm in the cause seemed most gene- 
rous and daring, diminishes the confidence which man 
might otherwise be inclined to place in man. The resis- 
tance which might speedily have been successful, but for a 
rash attempt in unfortunate circumstances, may thus prove 
unsuccessful, merely because others had essayed and failed. 
Without the high probability, therefore, of a great pre- 
ponderance of good, it cannot be morally right, in any 
circumstances, even of the most afflicting tyranny, to 
encourage a disobedience which the good that is to flow 
from it alone can justify. In the despotisms of the East, 
and in all the savage despotisms in which men, accustomed 
to look on power only as something that is to be endured, 
obey as brutally as they are brutally governed, what virtue 
could there be in rousing a few wretches to attempt what 
could not but fail in their hands, even if their number were 
comparatively greater, and in thus producing a few more 
murders, and a little more terror than would have existed, 
but for the foolish effort ? 

True fortitude is seen in great exploits, 

Which justice warrants, and which wisdom guides ; 

All else is towering frenzy and distraction. 1 

In ages of extreme luxurious profligacy, it would be, in 
like manner, vain to call to those who have no virtues, to 
arm themselves, from a virtuous hatred of oppression, 



1 Tragedy of Cato. 

Q2 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



against a tyrant whom other tyrants would speedily 
replace. Truth in the one case, in the other case virtue, 
must he previously diffused ; and if truth and virtue be 
diffused, their own silent operation may gradually succeed 
in producing that very amendment, which mere force, 
with all the additional evils which its violence produces, 
would have failed to effect. They form, indeed, the 
only useful, because the only permanent force, operating 
on the mind, in which all real strength is, and operating on 
it for ever. 

The great evil is, that for the diffusion of truth and 
virtue, a certain portion of freedom is necessary, which 
may not every where be found ; but, where there is not 
the truth or virtue, nor so much freedom as would allow 
the diffusion of them, what lover of the temperate liberty 
of mankind could hope, by mere violence, to produce it ! 
A single tyrant, indeed, may be hurled from his throne ; 
for this the very ministers of his power, by whom he has 
been what he was, themselves may do, while they bow the 
knee the very moment after to some new tyrant of their 
own number : but it is tyranny which the patriot hates ; 
and if that still subsist, the murder of a thousand tyrants 
would make tyranny an object only of more sickly loathing. 

It is enough, then, to find in the source of political 
authority, a justification of disobedience to it, in the extreme 
cases, in which alone it is morally allowable, or rather 
morally incumbent on the oppressed to disobey. It is in 
extreme cases only, that this sanction can be required ; 
and, in all the ordinary circumstances of society, to yield 
to the authority which all have concurred in obeying, when 
every constitutional method of obviating or mitigating the 
evil has been exerted, is at once the most virtuous, as it is 
the simplest mode of conduct that can be pursued. 

' The next patriotic duty which I mentioned, was the 
duty of defending the state against every aggressor. 

This duty of defending the land which we love, may 



DEFENDING OUR COUNTRY. 



347 



indeed be considered as implied in the very love which we 
bear to it. It is not necessary that we should think of 
what we have personally to lose before we consider the 
invader of our country as our enemy. It is not necessary 
even that we should image to ourselves the desolation which 
he is to spread, the miseries of blood and rapine by which 
his conquest would be perpetrated, and the deeper miseries 
of oppression which would follow it. It is enough for us to 
think of him as the invader of our land ; and in thus think- 
ing of him, we have already felt the duty of opposition. We 
may, indeed, afterwards trace in our imagination the sad 
series of consequences to those whom we directly love, and 
to those whom we love with a sort of indirect and borrowed 
affection, when we know nothing more of them than that 
they are our countrymen. "We may think more abstractly 
of the excellencies of our frame of laws which would be 
broken down, and feel an indignation at the outrage, as if 
this very frame of beautiful mechanism which we admire 
were itself a living thing. But though our indignation may 
thus be more fully developed, as we develop new causes of 
indignation, the strong emotion itself existed before. If the 
foot of an enemy, with an enemy's purpose, be pressing our 
soil, we feel in the very moment in which we learn it, if 
our hearts be not thoroughly corrupt, that he who has pre- 
sumed thus to advance, must either retreat or perish. 

In states in which the citizens themselves are trained to 
habits of military defence, the emotion of course is stronger, 
because the importance of individual exertions is there most 
powerfully felt. But the feeling is one which exists in some 
degree in every people. Even under the most wretched 
system of government, which has united men as a nation, 
only to make the congregated multitude of slaves an easier 
instrument of tyrannic power than if they existed as indi- 
viduals apart, there is still some patriotic reluctance felt to 
allow the ingress of a foreign tyrant, though only a tyrant 
of the same species with him who is obeyed with ready 



348 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



submission, merely because he is a part of the country 
itself ; and he who, in such a case, has calmly suffered the 
inarch of the invader, which he might have assisted in 
repelling, will, in seeing him take possession of a land which 
he can scarcely make more desolate than its own sovereign 
had allowed it to continue, feel some little portion of that 
self-disapprobation which the inhabitant of a land of freedom 
would have felt, if, in similar circumstances of aggression, 
he had given the aggressor as little reason to know, that 
the land which he was invading was not a land of slaves, 
but the birth-place of men, and the dwelling-place of men. 

The citizen, then, is to obey the laws and to defend them. 
These two duties relate to the political system that exists. 
He has still one other great duty, which relates not to things 
as they are, but to things as they may be. He is not to 
preserve the present system only ; he is to endeavour, if it 
require or admit of amelioration of any sort, to render it 
still more extensively beneficial to those who live under it, 
and still more worthy of the admiration of the world than 
with all its excellence it yet may be. 

He is justly counted a benefactor to his nation, who has 
been able to open to its industry new fields of supply, and 
to open to the products of its industry new distant markets 
of commercial demand. He, too, is a benefactor to the 
community who plans and obtains the execution of the 
various public works that facilitate the intercourse of dis- 
trict with district, or give more safety to navigation, or 
embellish a land with its best ornaments, the institutions of 
charity or instruction. In accomplishing, or contributing 
our aid to accomplish, these valuable ends, we perform a 
part of the duty which we are considering, the duty of 
augmenting, to the best of our ability, the sum of national 
happiness. But important as such exercises of public spirit 
are, they are not so important as the efforts of him who 
succeeds in remedying some error in the system of govern- 
ment, — some error, perhaps, which has been, in its more 



AUGMENTING THE GENERAL HAPPINESS. 349 



remote influence, the retarding cause, on account of which 
those very public plans, which otherwise might have been 
carried into effect many ages before, were not even con- 
ceived as possible, till they were brought forward by that 
provident wisdom and active zeal which have obtained, and 
justly obtained, our gratitude. 

The reform of a single political grievance may, in its 
ultimate effects, be the producer of all which we admire in 
the thousand acts of individual patriotism, — the opener of 
fields of industry, — the diffuser of commerce, — the embel- 
lisher of a land, — the enlightener and blesser of those who 
inhabit it. 

It is not possible, indeed, to estimate how valuable an 
offering he makes to society, who gives it a single good law. 
They are but a few words, perhaps, that compose it, but in 
those few words may be involved an amount of good, 
increasing progressively with each new generation ; which, 
if it could have been made known, in all its amplitude, to 
the legislator at the time when he contrived his project, 
would have dazzled and overwhelmed his very power of 
thought. What is true of a new law that relates to some 
positive institution is, as may be supposed, equally true of 
those laws which merely repeal and remedy the past ; since 
a single error in policy may, in its long continuance, pro- 
duce as much evil as a single wise enactment may, in its 
long continuance, produce of good. 

He, then, is not a true lover of the society to which he 
belongs, nor faithful to those duties which relate to it, who 
contents himself with admiring the laws which he might 
amend ; and who, far from wishing to amend them, regards 
perhaps, or professes to regard, every project of reformation, 
not as a proposal which is to be cautiously weighed, but as 
a sort of insult to the dignity of the whole system, which is 
to be rejected with wrath, and treated almost as a subject 
of penal censure. This blind admiration is not patriotism, 
or, if it be patriotism, it is, at least, only that easy form of 



350 



OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



it which the most corrupt may assume, without any diminu- 
tion of their own political profligacy. He who does not feel, 
in bis whole heart, the excellence of a wise and virtuous 
system of polity, is indeed unworthy of living under its 
protection. But he who does feel its excellence, will be the 
swiftest to discern every improvement that can be added to 
it. It is the same in the humbler concerns of private life. 
It is not the indifferent stranger, who, on seeing any one 
suffer from inconvenience of any kind, perceives most quickly 
the first involuntary intimation of uneasiness, and discovers, 
too, most quickly, what may be the best remedy. It is he 
who loves best the sufferer, and who sees best every noble 
endowment possessed by him : it is the mother watching 
her child, — the friend visiting his friend, — the son, the 
lover, the husband. The very nature of affection is to 
render us quick to imagine something which may make 
still better what is good ; and though he who admires least 
a system, may innovate most extensively, there can be no 
question that the most continued tendency to innovate, in 
some slight degree, is in him who admires most, upon the 
whole, what he therefore wishes most ardently to improve. 

If such be, as I cannot but think, the tendency of affec- 
tion, the loud and haughty patriotism of those who profess 
to see in any of the systems of human policy, which, as 
human, must share in some degree the general frailty of 
humanity, no evil which can require to be remedied, and 
even no good which can by any means be rendered still 
more ample in extension or degree, seems to me, for this 
very reason, suspicious ; at least as suspicious as the loud 
and angry patriotism of those who profess to see in the 
whole system nothing which is not a fit subject of instant 
and total alteration. If they love truly what they praise so 
highly, they would not praise it less, indeed, but they would 
wish, at least, to see it still more worthy of praise ; there 
would be a quickness, therefore,' to discover what would 
make it more worthy ; and, though they might be fearful 



AUGMENTING THE GENERAL HAPPINESS. 351 

of innovating, they would yet have many wishes of inno- 
vating, which nothing but the value of the subject of 
experiment, as too noble to be put in peril, could operate to 
suppress. 

It is this high importance of the subject of experiment, 
which is the true check on the innovating spirit, that, but 
for such a check, would be constantly operating in man, 
though there were no other inducement than the mere 
eagerness of curiosity, which wishes to see constantly new 
results, and is therefore constantly employed in placing 
objects in new circumstances. If the happiness and misery 
of nations were not dependent on the varying movements 
of the political machinery, or were dependent only for a 
few moments, so that, by the mere will of replacing all 
things in their former situation, we could truly replace 
them without any diminution of good or increase of evil, 
the game of legislation would indeed be the most magni- 
ficent game which could amuse our idleness or activity. 
But since happiness, which has once been injured, cannot 
be easily, if at all repaired, nor misery, once produced, be 
immediately dissipated, with the same ease with which we 
can shuffle kings, and queens, and knaves, and all the more 
insignificant cards, from the top to the bottom of the pack, 
or from the bottom to the top, and find the whole, after 
these successive changes, the same cards as before, with the 
same gaudy colouring and insignia of distinction, the game 
is too costly a one for human benevolence to wish to play. 

The same principle, I may remark, directs the patriot in 
the reformations which he wishes to produce, without 
departing from the regular usages of the constitution, that 
directs him in those rare and dreadful cases, in which it 
becomes to him a question of virtue, whether he is not to 
throw off the whole entanglement of usage, and reduce 
society again for a time to a state of barbarous contention 
of man with man, that, from this temporary disorder, a 
better and more regular system may arise. The directing 



352 



OP THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 



principle, in both cases, is the love of the good of the state 
and of mankind, that total and ultimate result of good on 
which it may be reasonable to calculate, after every deduc- 
tion has been made of the evil that may, directly or 
indirectly, flow from the trial. It is not enough, then, that 
there is a great and manifest defect in any part of the 
political system ; a source of evil as manifest, perhaps, as 
the evil itself. This may be sufficient to the demagogue, 
whose only object is to produce popular discontent with a 
system in which he has no part to act ; and who is, there- 
fore, rather pleased to discover the evil that may give a few 
animated periods to his eloquence, than grieved at the 
miseries on which so much of his logic and rhetoric depends. 
But, to the sincere lover of the happiness of the community, 
there must be not only the certainty of existing evil, but 
an obvious facility, or at least a very high probability of 
amendment ; and a probability of this, without an amount 
of accompanying evil equal, or even nearly equal, to the 
evil which he wishes to remove, before he will attempt a 
reformation that may be so perilous to the very happiness 
which it is his great ambition to promote. In calculating 
the results of good and evil, he will be careful too to make 
allowance for the influence of habit itself ; and will consider 
an evil that is new, such as his wished reformation might 
possibly produce, as when all other circumstances are the 
same, a greater evil than that which already exists, and to 
which the mind of the sufferer has learned, by long usage, 
to accommodate itself. Above all, he will make allowance 
for the possible fallacies of his own judgment. That others 
have not before regarded as evil, that which appears to 
him to be evil, though not enough to alter his judgment, 
will at least be felt by him as a circumstance which should 
render caution in this case more necessary than it would 
have been, if there had before been no existing government, 
but all was to be the instant result of one act of legislation. 
The remarks which Dr. Smith has made on the peculiar 



AUGMENTING THE GENERAL HAPPINESS. 353 

danger of the reforming spirit in princes, in reference to 
this deduction from the amount of incitement to innovate, 
which the possible fallacy of our opinion should produce, — 
a possibility which they who are accustomed to constant 
obsequiousness and adulation of all around, are not very 
ready to suspect, — are fully justified by the history, with 
very few exceptions, of all such attempts of royal or imperial 
reformers. 

" It is upon this account," he says, " that of all political 
speculators, sovereign princes are by far the most dangerous. 
This arrogance is perfectly familiar to them. They enter- 
tain no doubt of the immense superiority of their own 
judgment. When such imperial and royal reformers, 
therefore, condescend to contemplate the constitution of 
the country which is committed to their government, they 
seldom see any thing so wrong in it as the obstructions 
which it may sometimes oppose to the execution of their 
own will. They hold in contempt the divine maxim of 
Plato, and consider the state as made for themselves, not 
themselves for the state. The great object of their refor- 
mation, therefore, is to remove those obstructions, to reduce 
the authority of the nobility, to take away the privileges of 
cities and provinces, and to render both the greatest 
individuals, and the greatest orders of the state, as incapable 
of opposing their commands, as the weakest and most 
insignificant." 1 

In these cases, however, it is not, I conceive, the mere 
arrogance of opinion of which Dr. Smith speaks, that 
renders princes such rash and rapid innovators. Much of 
the tendency, I have no doubt, arises from the facility 
which they have found in executing the smaller matters, 
which they are in the hourly habit of willing and pro- 
ducing ; a facility which they naturally extend to other 
matters, in which they suppose that all things will arrange 



1 Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. ii. p. 96. 



354 OF THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP. 

themselves as readily, according to their will, as the actions 
and looks of those whose courtly ministry it is to do and 
look as they are ordered. They do not merely think them- 
selves better movers of the machinery than others, but the 
machinery of national happiness seems to them more simple 
and easy of management than it is ; because they have 
been able, in innumerable cases, to produce the very object 
which they desired, in all the circumstances which they 
desired, or to prevent what they considered as an evil to 
themselves or others, in the very way in which it seemed 
to them necessary or most expedient to prevent it. They 
innovate, therefore, with a more fearless spirit, because 
they think that the political machine will readily produce 
whatever they wish it to produce ; or, at any rate, that the 
touch of a single spring, or the application of a weight to a 
single pulley, will be sufficient to put the machine in its 
former state, if the movement which they have attempted 
should be found ineffectual to produce that particular 
equilibrium, or disturbance of equilibrium, which they 
desired to effect by it. 

The reformations which alone a sincere patriot will think 
of attempting, must be preceded, then, by much cautious 
examination of all the evils which the very desire of pro- 
ducing good, and good only, may often tend to occasion, 
almost as certainly as if the desire had had in view evil, 
and nothing more. I need not surely add, since it is of a 
moral duty I am treating, that the patriotic reformer will 
not be influenced by his own private views of ambition or 
factious dislike ; though these, it must be confessed, are the 
great movers of far more than half of that declamatory 
eloquence on public abuses, which, as we cannot see the 
heart, is often honoured with the name of patriotism. 
"Arsaces," says Montesquieu, in his political romance of 
that name, " Arsaces loved so much to preserve the laws 
and ancient customs of the Bactrians, that he trembled 
always at the very name of reform of abuses ; for he had 



AUGMENTING THE GENERAL HAPPINESS. 



355 



often remarked, that every oiie called that law, which was 
conformable to his personal views, and called an abuse 
whatever was likely to thwart his own interests." 

It is this hypocrisy of patriotism, which has been the 
most fatal of all evils to the reformation of a country. It 
is so easy to declaim against abuses, and so many personal 
objects may be attained by the declamation, that, to the 
unreflecting, it seems almost a sort of logical victory for 
the defender of real abuses to ascribe to such ambitious or 
sordid or factious motives the genuine hatred of corruption, 
and genuine love of man, in those who oppose the evils by 
which the defender of them exists. This imputation of 
unworthy designs or wishes is one of the greatest, or rather, 
is truly the greatest evil which a patriot, who is at heart a 
patriot, has to dread. But it is an evil which, like all 
other evils that are personal to himself, he is to brave, in 
that calm and temperate course of public virtue, in which 
he feels himself called to move. He loves, indeed, the 
esteem of mankind much, but there is something which he 
loves still more ; and he will not suffer the world to be 
miserable, that he may run a little less risk of being counted 
a hypocrite. 

I now, then, conclude the remarks which I had to offer 
on all the duties which we owe to others ; whether they 
relate to mere abstinence from injury, or to positive bene- 
ficence ; and whether they relate to all the individuals of 
mankind, or merely to a limited number of them that are 
connected with us by peculiar ties. 

I have treated, as you must have perceived, of our moral 
duties, with only few remarks on what are commonly 
denominated rights ; for this best of reasons, that the terms 
right and duty are, in the strictest sense, in morality at 
least, corresponding and commensurable. Whatever ser- 
vice it is my duty to do to any one, he has a moral right to 
receive from me : there is one moral emotion, one simple 
feeling of approvableness which constitutes to our heart, 



256 OF THE DUTIES DENOMINATED RIGHTS. 

in the consideration of any action, the right or the duty, 
according as we view the agent, or him to whom his action 
relates. I do not speak at present, it is to be remembered, 
of the additional force of law as applied to particular 
moral duties, a force which it may be expedient variously 
to extend or limit, but of the moral duties alone ; and in 
these, alike in every case, the moral duty implies a moral 
right, and the moral right a moral duty. When I say that 
it is my duty to perform a certain action, I mean nothing 
more than that if I do not perform it, I shall regard myself, 
and others will regard me, with moral disapprobation. 
When I say that any one has a moral right to my per- 
formance of a certain action, do I mean any thing more 
than was said by me, in the former case ? or rather, do I 
not simply mean still, that if I do not perform the action, 
the feeling of moral disapprobation will arise in myself and 
others ? 

The laws, indeed, have made a distinction of our duties, 
enforcing the performance of some of them, and not enforc- 
ing the performance of others ; but this partial interference 
of law, useful as it is in the highest degree to the happiness 
of the world, does not alter the nature of the duties them- 
selvesj which, as resulting from the moral nature of man, 
preceded every legal institution. 

The facility of determining certain duties in all their cir- 
cumstances, and the impossibility of determining others 
which vary with circumstances that cannot be made the 
subjects of judicial inquiry, and into which, for the general 
tranquillity of a state, it would not be expedient to make a 
nice inquiry, even though they could be made subjects of 
it, have been, of course, the great reason for which certain 
duties only are enforced by law, and others left to the 
morality of individuals themselves. It is easy, at least in 
most cases, and in all cases comparatively easy, to ascertain 
the obligation to the duties ranked together under the name 
justice, — the duties of abstaining from positive injury of 



OF THE DUTIES DENOMINATED RIGHTS. 357 

every sort, and of fulfilling precise conventional engage- 
ments. It would not be easy to ascertain, in like manner, 
what number of injuries, on the part of a benefactor, 
lessened, and perhaps destroyed altogether, the obligation to 
a grateful return of services for some early benefit received ; 
and an inquiry into such circumstances, as it might extend 
to many of the most delicate and confidential transactions 
of a long life, would, as inquisitorial, be productive of more 
evil, than it could be productive of good, as judicial. Gra- 
titude, therefore, is left, and wisely left, to the free moral 
sentiments of mankind : justice is enforced by the united 
power of the state. 

On this very simple distinction of duties which the law 
enforces, and of those which, for obvious reasons, it does 
not attempt to enforce, and on this alone, as I conceive, is 
founded the division of perfect and imperfect rights, which 
is so favourite a division with writers in jurisprudence, and 
with those ethical writers whose systems, from the prevail- 
ing studies and habits of the time, were in a great measure 
vitiated by the technicalities of law. The very use of these 
terms, however, has unfortunately led to the belief, that in 
the rights themselves, as moral rights, there is a greater or 
less degree of perfection or moral incumbency, when it is 
evident that morally there is no such distinction ; or, I may 
say even, that if there were any such distinction, the rights 
which are legally perfect would be often of less powerful 
moral force than rights which are legally said to be imper- 
fect. There is no one, I conceive, who would not feel more 
remorse, a deeper sense of moral impropriety, in having 
suffered his benefactor, to whom he owed all his affluence, 
to perish in a prison for some petty debt, than if he had 
failed in the exact performance of some trifling conditions 
of a contract, in the terms which he knew well that the law 
would hold to be definite and of perfect obligation. 

It is highly important, therefore, for your clear views in 
ethics, that you should see distinctly the nature of this dif- 



358 OF THE DUTIES DENOMINATED RIGHTS. 



ference, to which you must meet with innumerable allu- 
sions, and allusions that involve an obscurity which could 
not have been felt, but for the unfortunate ambiguity of the 
phrases employed to distinguish rights that are easily 
determinable by law, and therefore enforced by it, from 
rights which are founded on circumstances less easily deter- 
minable, and therefore not attempted to be enforced by 
legal authority. 

It is, as I have said, on the one simple feeling of moral 
appro vableness, that every duty, and therefore every right, 
is founded. All rights are morally perfect ; because, wher- 
ever there is a moral duty to another living being, there is 
a moral right in that other ; and where there is no duty there 
is no right. There is as little an imperfect right in any moral 
sense, as there is in logic an imperfect truth or falsehood. 

Actions of which the right is clearly determinable in all 
its circumstances, or may be imagined at least to be clearly 
determinable, the law takes under its cognizance. But, 
into the greater number of our virtues or vices, it makes 
no judicial inquiry. And though it might seem, on first 
reflection, to be more advantageous, if all which is morally 
due to us, might have been judicially claimed, it is well 
that so many virtues are left at our own disposal. But for 
this freedom from legal compulsion, there could be no vir- 
tue, at least no virtue which could to others be a source of 
delight, however gratifying the conscious disinterestedness 
might be to the breast of the individual. What pleasure 
could we derive from the ready services of affection, if the 
failure of one of them would have subjected the delinquent 
to personal punishment ; if we could not distinguish, there- 
fore, the kindness of the heart, from the selfish semblance 
of it which it was prudence to assume, and if the delight- 
ful society under the domestic roof had thus been converted 
into-a college of students of domestic law, calculating smiles 
and proportioning every tone of tenderness to the strict 
requisitions of the statute-book ? 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 359 



LECTURE XX. 

OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 

My last Lecture brought to a conclusion my remarks on 
the various moral relations which connect every individual 
of mankind with every other individual, some by ties of 
peculiar interest, but all by the obligation of benevolent 
washes and of benevolent efforts, when it is in our power to 
free even a stranger from suffering, or to afford him any 
gratification which he could not have enjoyed but for us. 

The ethical inquiries which have of late engaged us, may 
be considered, then, as developments of one great truth, 
which it is impossible for man to consider too often ; that 
he does not enter life to be an idle spectator of the magni- 
ficence of the universe, and of the living beings like 
himself that dwell with him on that globe which is his 
temporary home, but that he has duties to perform as well 
as pleasures to enjoy and pains to avoid ; that he has it in 
his power to relieve the sufferings of others and to augment 
their happiness, and that, having this power, he must be an 
object of approbation to himself, if he use it for those noble 
purposes, or of disapprobation to himself, if he neglect to 
use it ; still more, if, instead of merely neglecting the hap- 
piness of others, he exert himself, intentionally, to lessen it, 
and add to the sufferings that exist in the world, indepen- 
dently of him, the sufferings which it is in his power to 
inflict on others, and the more dreadful sufferings of remorse 
and despair that must be felt by his own guilty heart. 

I should now, in regular order, proceed to the consider- 
ation of that propriety of conduct, with respect to the 
individual, which constitutes what has been termed our 
duty to ourselves. But, as this inquiry involves chiefly 



360 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



the consideration of happiness, and as so much of human 
happiness has relation to our notions of the Divinity and 
our prospects of immortal life, it seems to me better, upon 
the whole, to deviate in a slight degree from our regular plan, 
and to give our attention first to those great subjects, before 
entering on the inquiry which must have relation to them. 

We have already considered man in various aspects ; as 
a sensitive being, capable of being affected by the things 
around him, and deriving from them not pleasure, and pain, 
and sustenance, merely, but the elements of his knowledge ; 
as an intellectual being, capable of discovering the relations 
of things, comparing, generalizing, forming systems of 
truth, and almost creating worlds of fiction that arise with 
the semblance of truth at the mere will of his fancy ; and, 
lastly, as a moral agent, connected with other moral agents, 
by ties that are innumerable as the living objects to whom 
they relate. We have now to consider the more important 
relation, which, as a created and dependent, but immortal 
being, he bears to that supreme being, who is the great 
source of all existence. 

On this subject, that comprehends the sublimest of all 
the truths which man is permitted to attain, the benefit of 
revelation may be conceived to render every inquiry super- 
fluous, which does not flow from it. But to those who are 
blessed with a clearer illumination, it cannot be uninteresting 
to trace the fainter lights, which in the darkness of so many 
gloomy ages, amid the oppression of tyranny in various 
forms, and of superstition more afflicting than tyranny 
itself, could preserve, still dimly visible to man, that virtue 
which he was to love, and that Creator whom he was to 
adore. Nor can it be without profit, even to their better 
faith, to find all nature thus concurring, as to its most im- 
portant truths, with revelation itself ; and every thing 
living and inanimate announcing that high and holy one, 
of whose perfections they have been privileged with a more 
splendid manifestation. 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



S6I 



TVe have to consider, then, not the tie which connects 
man with his parents only, and with that race of mortal 
ancestors by whom a frail existence has been successively 
transmitted from those who lived for a few feeble years, to 
those who lived afterwards for a few feeble years, but that 
far nobler principle of union, by which he is connected 
with him who has existed for ever, the Creator of the uni- 
verse, and the Preserver of that universe which he has 
created. The inquiry into the existence of the noblest of ■■> 
beings, into the existence of him to whom we look as the 
source of every thing which we enjoy and admire, is itself 
surely the noblest of all the inquiries on which man can 
enter ; and the feelings with which we enter on it should 
be of a kind that is suitable to the contemplation of a nature 
so noble, even as possibly existing. " Si intramus templa 
compositi," says an eloquent pagan writer, when beginning 
an inquiry into some of the mere works of God, u si ad 
sacrificium accessuri vultum submittimus, si in omne argu- 
mentum modestiae fingimur ; quanto hoc magis facere 
debemus, cum de sideribus, de stellis, de deorum natura 
disputamus, ne quid temere, ne quid impudenter, aut igno- 
rantes affirmemus, aut scientes mentiamur." 1 

The universe exhibits indisputable marks of design, and 
is therefore not self-existing, but the work of a designing 
mind. There exists, then, a great designing mind. Such 
is the first truth with respect to the indication of divinity 
in the universe, to which I would direct your attention. 

If the world had been without any of its present adapta- 
tion of parts to parts, only a mass of matter, irregular in 
form, and quiescent, — and if we could conceive ourselves, 
with all our faculties as vigorous as now, contemplating 
such an irregular and quiescent mass, without any thought 
of the order displayed in our own mental frame, I am far 
from contending that, in such circumstances, with nothing 

1 Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones, lib. yii. cap. xxx. 

R 



362 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



before us that could be considered as indicative of a parti- 
cular design, we should have been led to the conception of 
a Creator. On the contrary, I conceive the abstract argu- 
ments which have been adduced to show that it is impossible 
for matter to have existed from eternity, by reasonings on 
what has been termed necessary existence, and the incom- 
patibility of this necessary existence with the qualities of 
matter, to be relics of the mere verbal logic of the schools, 
as little capable of producing conviction as any of the wildest 
and most absurd of the technical scholastic reasonings on 
the properties or supposed properties of entity and non- 
entity. Eternal existence, the existence of that which never, 
had a beginning, must always be beyond our distinct com- 
prehension, whatever the eternal object may be, material 
or mental ; and as much beyond our comprehension in the 
one case as in the other, though it is impossible for us to 
doubt that some being, material or mental, must have been 
eternal, if any thing exists. 

Had there e'er been nought, nought still had been ; 
Eternal these must be. 1 

In the circumstances supposed, however, it is very pro- 
bable that if we formed any thought at all upon the subject, 
we should have conceived the rude quiescent mass to have 
been itself eternal, as, indeed, seems to have been the uni- 
versal opinion of the ancient philosophers with respect to 
the matter of the universe, even though they admitted the 
existence of divine beings as authors of that beautiful regu- 
larity which we perceive. The mass alone would have 
been visible, — creation, as a fact, unknown to our expe- 
rience, — and in the mass itself, nothing which could be 
regarded as exhibiting traces of an operating mind. 

But though matter, as an unformed mass, existing with- 
out relation of parts, would not, I conceive, of itself have 
suggested the notion of a Creator, — since in every hypo- 

1 Night Thoughts, Night ix. 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



S63 



thesis, something material or mental must have existed 
uncaused, and mere existence, therefore, is not necessarily 
a mark of previous causation, unless we take for granted 
an infinite series of causes, — it is very different when the 
mass of matter is considered as possessing proportions and 
obvious relations of parts to each other, relations which do 
not exist merely in separate pairs, but many of which 
concur in one more general relation, and many of these 
again, in relations more general still. In short, when the 
whole universe seems to present to us, on whatever part of 
it we may look, exactly the same appearances as it would 
have presented if its parts had been arranged intentionally 
for the purpose of producing the results which are now 
perceived, — when these appearances of adaptation are not 
in a few objects out of many, but in every thing that meets 
our view, and innumerable, therefore, as the innumerable 
objects that constitute to us the universe, we feel an absolute 
impossibility of supposing that so many appearances of 
design exist without design ; an impossibility against which 
it may not be difficult to adduce words in the form of argu- 
ment, but which it would be as difficult to endeavour not 
to feel, as to divest ourselves of that very capacity of rea- 
soning to which the negative argument must be addressed. 
It would be absurd to attempt to state how many propor- 
tions may co-exist, and yet be imagined by us not to imply 
necessarily any design in the production of them. A few 
types, for example, may be thrown loosely together, and 
some of them may form a word. This we can believe, 
without any suspicion of contrivance. If many such words, 
however, were to be thrown together, we should suspect 
contrivance, and would believe contrivance, with the most 
undoubting conviction, if a multitude of types were to be 
found, thus forming one regular and continued poem. This 
instance, I may remark by the way, is one which is used 
by Cicero ; though it is one which we should little have 
expected to find in an ancient writer, in ages when the 



364 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



blessing of the art of printing was unknown. In speaking 
of the opinion of those who contend that the universe was 
formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, he says, " Hoc 
qui existimat fieri potuisse, non intelligo, cur non idem 
putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formae literarum, 
vel aureae vel qualeslibet, aliqud conjiciantur, posse ex his 
in terram excussis, annales Ennii ut deinceps legi possent 
efh'ci ; quod nescio, an, ne in uno quidem versu, possit tan- 
turn valere fortuna." 1 

Such is our nature, then, that it would seem as truly 
impossible that a number of types thrown together should 
form the Iliad or Odyssey, as that they should form Homer 
himself. We might assert, indeed, that it was by chance 
that each type had found its way into its proper place ; 
but, in asserting this, our understanding would belie our 
sceptical assertion. A certain continued series of relations 
is believed by us to imply contrivance, as truly as the sen- 
sations produced in us are conceived to imply the existence 
of corresponding sensible qualities in the objects without ; 
or as any conclusion in reasoning itself is felt to be virtually 
contained in the premises which evolve it. The great 
question is, whether, in the universe, there be any such 
continued series of relations? 

Strange as it may seem, that, by knowing more and 
more fully all the uses which the different parts of the 
universe fulfil, we should be less disposed to think of the 
contrivance which those concurring uses indicate, the fact 
is certain. As often as we do think of them, indeed, in 
relation to their origin, and say within ourselves, is this 
admirable seeming arrangement fortuitous or the work of 
design ? we feel more profoundly, that there must have 
been contrivance, in proportion as we have discovered more 
traces of harmony in the disposition of the parts subservient 
to Certain uses. But still we think of these less frequently, 



J De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. p. 509. Ernest. Lond. 1819. 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



365 



merely because they have often been before us. We have 
all some particular objects on which we are intent— of plea- 
sure, or business, or what at least we take to be business. 
It requires some astonishment, therefore, to make us pause 
and suspend our thoughts, which we have already given to 
some other object ; and astonishment requires that the 
object which excites it should be new. If it had been 
possible for the generations of mankind to have existed in 
society in a world of darkness, and that splendid luminary, 
by the regular appearances of which we now date our 
existence, had suddenly arisen on the earth, how imme- 
diately would it have suspended every project and passion, 
all those projects, and passions, and frivolities, which fill 
our hearts at present with their own petty objects, so as 
scarcely to leave room for a single better thought ! The 
gayest trifler would, for an instant, have ceased to be a 
trifler. The most ambitious courtly sycophant, who had 
been creeping for years round the throne, labouring to 
supplant rivals whom he never had seen, with the same 
assiduity as that with which competitors for royal favour, 
in a world of sunshine, labour to supplant rivals whom they 
have seen, would have thought of something more than of 
himself and them at such a moment. The very atheists of 
such a world, whose chief amusement, in their blindness, 
had been the ingenuity of proving that the world must 
have existed for ever, as it existed then, would almost have 
felt, on such an appearance, that there is a power which 
can create, and would have been believers in that power, 
for some moments at least, though they might have hastened, 
as soon as their superstitious fear permitted them, to accom- 
modate the new phenomenon to their system. The sudden 
appearance, then, of the sun, as it rose in all its magnificence, 
on beings who had never before enjoyed a single ray of its 
profusion of splendour, would have led every heart to think 
of some mighty Power that had formed it. It would have 
produced that great effect which Lucretius and Petronius, 



366 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



taking a casual concomitant for the cause, very falsely 
ascribe to fear, but which is, in truth, the effect of that 
admiration of the great and new, which may be combined 
with fear, though not necessarily, as it may be combined 
with feelings of a very different kind. 

Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor ; ardua coelo 
Fulmina quum caderent, discussaque moenia flammis, 
Atque ictus flagraret Athos. 

Fear of supernatural power, in such a case, it is very 
evident, must be the effect of previous belief of the exis- 
tence of that Power which is feared, for no one can fear 
that which he does not conceive to exist. It was not the 
fear, therefore, but the previous admiration of the new 
phenomenon, which, in Petronius's sense, " made the 
Gods and, but for this admiration of what was new and 
great, the fear of the thunderbolt could as little have pro- 
duced fear of a Divine Being, before unknown and unsus- 
pected, as the fear of being burnt to death when our house 
was on fire, could, of itself, have suggested the notion of a 
Divinity. 

The sudden appearance of the sun, then, in a case like 
that which I have supposed, would have led every mind to 
some thought as to its origin. It would have indicated 
power of some sort. But the sun would have gone down ; 
and, though there might be some little hope that what had 
once appeared might reappear, it could have been only a 
slight hope. The night once passed, however, it would 
return in its former magnificence ; and, after a few succes- 
sions of days and nights, its regularity would add to the 
previous conception of power, some conception of corres- 
ponding order in the power, whatever it might be, which 
sent it forth with so much regularity. Such would have 
been our feelings, if we had not known the sun ever since 
we remember existence. Its rising and setting are now, as 
it were, a part of our own life. We arrange the labours of 
the day, so as to bring them to a conclusion before the 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



367 



darkness with which evening is to close ; and we lie down 
at night full of projects for the morning, with perfect 
reliance that the light which guided us during the past day, 
wilfguide us equally in that which is soon to shine upon 
us. Yet this very circumstance, — the regularity with 
which the sun has appeared to distribute to us its innume- 
rable blessings, a regularity which gives to the splendid 
phenomenon itself more indubitable marks of the power 
which is its source, — is the circumstance that prevents us 
from thinking of this divine source. u Sed assiduitate 
quotidiana," says Cicero, "et consuetudine oculorum, as- 
suescunt animi, neque admirantur, neque requirunt rationes 
earum rerum, quas semper vident ; proinde quasi novitas 
nos magis quani magnitudo rerum, debeat ad exquirendas 
causas excitare." 1 

Even if, when we first beheld the wonderful appearances 
of nature, our faculties had been such as they are when 
matured in after life, though the phenomenon must, of 
course, have become equally familiar to us, we should still 
have retained some impression of those feelings which the 
aspect of the universe must have excited in us when we 
first entered into this world of glory. " The miracles of 
nature," says Diderot, " are exposed to our eyes, long 
before we have reason enough to derive any light from 
them. If we entered the world with the same reason 
which we carry with us to an opera, the first time that we 
enter a theatre, — and if the curtain of the universe, if I 
may so term it, were to be rapidly drawn up, struck with 
the grandeur of every thing which we saw, and all the 
obvious contrivances exhibited, we should not be capable of 
refusing our homage to the Eternal power which had pre- 
pared for us such a spectacle. But who thinks of marvel- 
ling at what he has seen for fifty years ? What multitudes 
are there, who, wholly occupied with the care of obtaining 



1 De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. p. 510. 



S68 OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 

subsistence, have no time for speculation : the rise of the 
sun is only that which calls them to toil, and the finest 
night, in all its softness, is mute to them, or tells them only 
that it is the hour of repose.'' 1 

When we read, for the first time, the account which 
Adam gives to the angel of his feelings, when, with faculties 
such as we have supposed, and every thing new before him, 
he found himself in existence in that happy scene of 
Paradise which Milton has described, we are apt to think 
that the poet has represented him as beginning too soon to 
reason with respect to the power to which he must have 
owed his existence ; and yet, if we deduct the influence of 
long familiarity, and suppose even a mind less vigorous 
than that of Adam, but with faculties such as exist now 
only in mature life, to be placed in the first moment of 
existence in such a scene, we shall find, the more we 
reflect on the situation, that the individual scarcely could 
fail to philosophize in the same manner. 

As new waked from soundest sleep, 
Soft on the flow'ry herb I found me laid, 
In balmy sweat, which, with his beams the sun 
Soon dried, and on the reeking moisture fed. 
Straight toward heaven my wond'ring eyes I turn'd, 
And gazed awhile the ample sky, till raised 
By quick instinctive motion up I sprung, 
As thitherward endeavouring, and upright 
Stood on my feet. About me round I saw 
Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains, 
And liquid lapse of murmuring streams : by these 
Creatures that lived and moved, or walk'd or flew, 
Birds on the branches warbling : all things smiled ; 
With fragrance, and with joy my heart o'erflow'd. 
Myself I then perused, and limb by limb 
Survey'd, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran, 
With supple joints, as lively vigour led : 
But who I was, or whence, or from what cause, 



1 (Euyres de Diderot, tome i. p. 100. Amst. 1772, 12mo. 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



369 



Knew not ; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake. 
My tongue obey'd, and readily could name 
Whate'er I saw. Thou sun, said I, fair light ! 
And thou, enlighten'd earth, so fresh and gay, 
Ye hills and dales, ye rivers, woods, and plains, 
And ye that live and move, fair creatures, tell, 
Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here ; 
Not of myself ; by some great Maker then, 
In goodness and in power pre-eminent; 
Tell me how may I know him, how adore, 
From whom I have, that thus I move and live, 
And feel that I am happier than I know. 1 

Refined as this reasoning may seem in such circumstances 
of new existence, it seems to us refined only because, on 
imagining the situation of our first parent, it is difficult for 
us to divest ourselves of long-accustomed feelings, and to 
suppose in his vigorous mind the full influence of that 
primary vivid admiration which we have never felt, because 
our minds had become accustomed to the sublime magni- 
ficence of the world before they were capable of feeling the 
delightful wonder which, if it had been felt by us as he who 
is so poetically described must have felt it, would have led 
us too to reason in the same manner, and to feel perhaps 
that instant gratitude to which his tongue was so ready to 
give utterance. 

All the impression, then, which the wonders of nature 
would produce upon us, as new, is of course lost to us now. 
"What would have forced itself upon us, without reflection, 
requires now an effort of reflection. But, when we make 
the reflection, the contrivance does not appear to us less 
irresistibly marked. We have, indeed, many more proofs 
of such contrivance, than we could possibly have had, but 
for that experience which has been adding to them every 
day. 

If a multitude of parts, all manifestly relating to each 
1 Paradise Lost, book viii. 253-282. 

R 2 



S70 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



other, and producing a result which itself has as manifest a 
relation to the results of other proportions, cannot be ob- 
served by us without an irresistible impression of design ; 
if it is impossible for us to conceive that nine millions of 
alphabetic characters could fall of themselves into a treatise 
or a poem ; that all the pictures, I will not say in the 
whole world, but even the few which are to be found in a 
single gallery, were the product of a number of colours 
thrown at random from a brush upon canvass ; that a city, 
with all its distinct houses, and all the distinct apartments 
in those houses, and all the implements of domestic use 
which those apartments contain, could not have existed 
without some designing mind, and some hands that fashioned 
the stone aud the wood, and performed all the other opera- 
tions necessary for erecting and adorning the different 
edifices ; if it be easier for us to believe that our senses 
deceived us in exhibiting to us such a city, and that there 
w r as truly nothing seen by us, than to believe that the 
houses existed of themselves without any contrivance; 
the only question, as I have already said, is, whether the 
universe itself exhibits such combinations of parts relating 
to each other, as the poem, the picture, the city, or any 
other object for which we find it necessary to have recourse 
to designing skill. It is quite evident that, in such a case 
as this, all abstract reasoning is superfluous. We have not 
to investigate the relation which harmony of parts bears 
to design, or to enter into nice disquisitions on the theory 
of probabilities. We are addressing men, and we address, 
therefore, beings to whom doubt of such a relation is im- 
possible, who require no abstract reasoning to be convinced 
that the Iliad of Homer, or Euclid's Elements of Geometry, 
could not be formed by any loose and casual apposition of 
alphabetic characters after characters, and who, for the 
same reason, must believe that any similar order implies 
similar design. If this connexion of a regular series of 
relations with some regulating mind, is not felt, there is at 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



371 



least as much reason to suspect that any abstract reasoning 
on probabilities will be as little felt, since every reasoning 
must assume a principle itself unproved, and as little uni- 
versal as such belief in such circumstances. Still more 
superfluous must be all those reasonings with respect to the 
existence of the Deity, from the nature of certain concep- 
tions of our mind, independent of the phenomena of design, 
which are commonly termed reasonings a priori, — reason- 
ings that, if strictly analyzed, are found to proceed on some 
assumption of the very truth for which they contend, and 
that, instead of throwing additional light on the argument 
for a Creator of the universe, have served only to throw 
on it a sort of darkness, by leading us to conceive that there 
must be some obscurity in truths which could give occasion 
to reasoning so obscure. God, and the world which he has 
formed — these are our great objects. Every thing which 
we strive to place between these is nothing. "We see the 
universe, and, seeing it, we believe in its Maker. It is the 
universe, therefore, which is our argument, and our only 
argument ; and, as it is powerful to convince us, God is, or 
is not, an object of our belief. 

If proportion, order, subserviency to certain uses that are 
themselves subservient to other uses, and these to others, 
in a regular series, be then what it is impossible for us to 
consider, without the belief of design, what is the universe 
but a spectacle of such relations in every part ? From the 
great masses that roll through space, to the slightest atom 
that forms one of their imperceptible elements, every thing 
is conspiring for some purpose. I shall not speak of the 
relations of the planetary motions to each other ; of the 
mutual relations of the various parts of our globe ; of the 
different animals of the different elements, in the conformity 
of their structure to the qualities of the elements which they 
inhabit ; of man himself, in all the nice adaptations of his 
organs, for purposes which the anatomist and physiologist 
may explain to us in more learned language, but which 



372 



OP THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



even the vulgar, who know only the thousandth part, or 
far less than the thousandth part, of the wonders of their 
own frame, yet see sufficiently, to be convinced of an arrange- 
ment which the physiologist sees more fully, but does not 
believe more undoubtingly. To these splendid proofs, it is 
scarcely necessary to do more than to allude. But, when 
we think of the feeblest and most insignificant of living 
things — the minutest insect, which it requires a microscope 
to discover ; when we think of it, as a creature, having 
limbs that move it from place to place, nourished by little 
vessels, that bear to every fibre of its frame some portion 
of the food which other organs have rendered fit for serving 
the purposes of nutrition, — having senses, as quick to dis- 
cern the objects that bear to it any relative magnitude, as 
ours, and not merely existing as a living piece of most 
beautiful mechanism, but having the power which no mere 
mechanism, however beautiful, ever had, of multiplying its 
own existence, by the production of living machines exactly 
resembling itself, in all the beautiful organic relations that 
are clustered as it were in its little frame ; when we think 
of all the proofs of contrivance which are thus to be found 
in what seems to us a single atom, or less than a single 
atom, and when we think of the myriads of myriads of such 
atoms which inhabit even the smallest portion of that earth 
which is itself but an almost invisible atom, compared with 
the great system of the heavens, what a combination of 
simplicity and grandeur do we perceive ! It is one universal 
design, or an infinity of designs : nothing seems to us little, 
because nothing is so little as not to proclaim that Omnipo- 
tence which made it ; and I may say, too, that nothing 
seems to us great in itself, because its very grandeur speaks 
to us of that immensity before which all created greatness 
is scarcely to be perceived. 

On particular arguments of this kind, that are as 
innumerable as the things which exist, I feel that it is quite 
idle to dwell. Those whom a single organized being, or 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



373 



even a single organ, such as the eye, the ear, the hand, does 
not convince of the being of a God, — who do not see him, 
not more in the social order of human society, than in a 
single instinct of animals, producing unconsciously a result 
that is necessary for their continued existence, and yet a 
result which they cannot have foreknown, — will not see 
him in all the innumerable instances that might be crowded 
together by philosophers and theologians. If, then, such 
be our nature, that regularity of parts, subservient to certain 
uses, impresses us necessarily with a feeling of previous 
contrivance, we speak against the conviction of our own 
heart as often as we affect to shelter ourselves in the use of 
a frivolous word, and say, of all the contrivance of the 
universe, that it is only the result of chance, — of chance to 
which it would seem to us absurd to ascribe the far humbler 
traces of intellect that are to be found in a poem, or a 
treatise of philosophy. What should we think of any one 
who should ascribe to chance the combinations of letters 
that form the Principia of Newton ! and is the world which 
Newton described less gloriously indicative of wisdom than 
the mere description ? The word chance, in such a case, 
may be regarded as expressive only of unwilling assent. 
It is a word easily pronounced, but it is nothing more. 

" How long," says Tillotson, in one of his Sermons, 
" might twenty thousand blind men, which should be sent 
out from the several remote parts of England, wander up 
and down before they would all meet upon Salisbury Plains, 
and fall into rank and file in the exact order of an army ? 
And yet this is much more easy to be imagined, than how 
the innumerable blind parts of matter should rendezvous 
themselves into a world. A man that sees Henry the 
Seventh's chapel at Westminster, might, with as good 
reason, maintain, (yea, with much better, considering the 
vast difference betwixt that little structure and the huge 
fabric of the world,) that it was never contrived or built by 
any man, but that the stones did by chance grow into 



874 OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 

those curious figures into which they seem to have been 
cut and graven ; and that upon a time (as tales usually 
begin) the materials of that building, the stone, mortar, 
timber, iron, lead, and glass, happily met together, and 
very fortunately ranged themselves into that delicate order 
in which we see them now so close compacted, that it must 
be a very great chance that parts them again. "What 
would the world think of a man that should advance such 
an opinion as this, and write a book for it ? If they would 
do him right, they ought to look upon him as mad ; but yet 
with a little more reason than any man can have to say that 
the world was made by chance." 1 

The world, then, was made ; there is a designing Power 
which formed it, — a Power whose own admirable nature 
explains whatever is admirable on earth, and leaves to us, 
instead of the wonder of ignorance, that wonder of know- 
ledge and veneration which is not astonishment, but love 
and awe. 

" The impious," says an eloquent French writer, " are 
struck with the glory of princes and conquerors that found 
the little empires of this earth ; and they do not feel the 
omnipotence of that hand which laid the foundations of the 
universe. They admire the skill and the industry of 
workmen, who erect those palaces which a storm may 
throw down ; and they will not acknowledge wisdom, in 
the arrangements of that infinitely more superb work which 
the revolutions of ages have respected, and must continue 
to respect till he who made it shall will it to pass away. 
In vain, however, do they boast that they do not see God ; 
it is because they seek him, who is perfect holiness, in a 
heart that is depraved by its passions. But they have only 
to look out of themselves, and they will find him every 
where : the whole earth will announce to them its maker ; 
and if they refuse still their assent, their own corrupted 



1 Tillotson's Works, vol. i. sermon i. p. 12. LoncL 1752, folio. 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY, 375 

heart will be the only thing in the universe which does not 
proclaim the author of its being." 1 

So completely do we feel this universal assent of nature, 
in acknowledging the existence of its author, that we enter 
readily into those poetic personifications which animate 
every object, and call on them to mingle as it were in 
worship with mankind. 

To Him, ye vocal gales, 
Breathe soft, whose spirit in your freshness breathes ! 
talk of Him in solitary glooms, 
Where, o'er the rock, the scarcely waving pine 
Fills the brown shade with a religious awe. 
And ye, whose holder note is heard afar, 
Who shake the astonish'd world, lift high to Heaven 
The impetuous song, and say, from whom you rage. 
His praise, ye brooks, attune, ye trembling rills, 
And let me catch it, as I muse along. 
Ye headlong torrents, rapid and profound; 
Ye softer floods, that lead the humid maze 
Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, 
A secret world of wonders in thyself, 
Sound His stupendous praise, whose greater voice 
Or bids you roar, or bids your roarings fall. 2 

To that power which we thus call on them to attest, they 
all truly bear witness. We assign to them feelings which 
they have not, indeed, as much as we assign to them a 
voice which they have not ; but, so strong is the evidence 
of mind which they bear, that it seems as if we merely give 
them a voice expressing, in our language, what they 
mutely feel. 



1 Massillon. 



Thomson, Hymn on the Seasons. 



376 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



LECTURE XXI. 

OF THE EXISTENCE — THE UNITY — THE OMNISCIENCE — THE OMNIPO- 
TENCE — AND THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 

My last Lecture was employed in considering the 
evidence which the frame of nature exhibits, of the being 
of its divine Author. 

Of this there appears to me to be only one argument 
which can produce conviction, but that an argument so 
irresistible, as to correspond, in its influence on the mind, 
with the power of him whose existence it forces even the 
most reluctant to acknowledge. The arguments commonly 
termed metaphysical, on this subject, I have always 
regarded as absolutely void of force, unless in as far as 
they proceed on a tacit assumption of the physical 
argument ; and, indeed, it seems to me no small corrobo- 
rative proof of the force of this physical argument, that 
its remaining impression on our mind has been sufficient 
to save us from any doubt as to that existence, which the 
obscure and laborious reasonings a priori, in support of it, 
would have led us to doubt rather than to believe. 

The universe is that which shows the existence of the 
Author of the universe. It exhibits a harmony of relations, 
to perceive which is to perceive design ; that is to say, it is 
impossible for us to perceive them without feeling imme- 
diately, that the harmony of parts with parts, and of their 
results with each other, must have had its origin in some 
designing mind. I did not conceive it necessary to occupy 
much of your time in tracing the various relations of this 
sort which the universe presents, in the small as in the 
great, in the simple as in the complicated, for there is no 
need to exhibit a multitude of contrivances to prove a con- 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



377 



triver. " Nec avis pennulam," says St. Austin, " nec 
herbae flosculum, nec arboris folium, sine partium suarum 
convenientia reliquit." It is pleasing, indeed, to trace, in 
every part of the creation, the wisdom by which it was 
created, as often as any new proof of beneficent intention 
is discovered by us, in some part, of which the uses were 
before unknown ; but it is pleasing, only from the accession 
which is thus made to our physical knowledge, and from 
the interest which we feel in contemplating the works of a 
Power which we love, not from any stronger faith which 
we thence derive in the existence of that Power. He who 
can examine anatomically, I will not say the whole frame 
of a single organized being, but even a single organ, and 
not perceive design, — who can look, for example, at the 
different parts of the eye, and believe that they exist as 
they are, without any adaptation to the light which they 
refract, and to the sentient mind ; who can see the bony 
socket which defends so precious an organ from external 
violence, the flexible covering in the lid, which can be 
raised or depressed at pleasure, that preserves it from in- 
juries of a different kind ; the apparatus for preparing a 
due quantity of moisture to lubricate the ball, and the con- 
duit for carrying away all superfluous moisture ; the muscles 
that enable us to vary at pleasure the field of our vision, by 
giving ready motion to the visual orb ; and the soft cushion 
on which it rests, that these motions, however swift, may 
be performed without injury, — who, after observing these 
various provisions, that are merely external to it, considers 
what it is which is to be found within the little orb itself, 
the wonderful apparatus by which the rays of light from a 
wide field, that comprehends in it objects at many distances, 
are all made to converge, so as to form one distinct image 
on the small expansion of the optic nerve ; and the appa- 
ratus, as wonderful, by which the quantity of light admitted 
or excluded is tempered to the delicate sensibility of the 
nerve, and this, not tardily at our bidding, since the injury 



378 



OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY. 



might then be done before we were able to know the danger, 
but instantly, without our volition, and even without our 
knowledge that any such process is taking place, — he who 
can consider the small compass within which so many 
wonders are condensed, and ascribe to chance, what, if in- 
vented by a human being, he could not fail to regard as the 
noblest instrument which wisdom, in all its ingenuity, had 
ever invented, may indeed be an atheist; but such an 
atheist would continue an atheist, though the whole won- 
ders of the living and inanimate universe were exhibited 
in succession to his view. 

To such a being, if such a denier of the slightest inten- 
tional adaptation of parts to parts in the frame of the 
universe were truly to exist, it would, indeed, be as diffi- 
cult to prove the existence of God, as to prove the truths 
that are evolved from any process of arithmetical or 
geometrical reasoning, to one who denied in words the 
elementary relations which the separate propositions of the 
reasoning involve ; but we do not rely the less on those 
truths of demonstration, on account of the mere verbal 
sophistry which denies them, or professes to deny them ; 
and, notwithstanding the similar profession of scepticism as 
to design, it is equally impossible for us to consider a single 
organ like the eye, without believing that there was some 
one by whom the beautiful apparatus was contrived. We 
cannot read a poem or a treatise, without believing that it 
is a work of human art ; nor read the characters of divi- 
nity in the universe, without thinking of its divine Author. 

The manifest order of the universe, in the relation of 
parts to parts, and of their joint results to other joint results 
of other parts, is a proof then of some designing power, 
from which all this magnificent order took its rise : and 
the great Being, to whom, in discovering design, we ascribe 
the designing power, is the Being whom we denominate 
God. The harmony which is the proof of design, is itself 
a proof of the relative unity of that design. This designing 



OF THE UNITY OF THE DEITY. 



379 



power is one then, in the only sense in which we are en- 
titled to speak either of divine unity or plurality, as 
indicated by the frame of nature before us ; for it is only 
from the phenomena of the universe that we are capable of 
inferring the existence of any higher being whatever ; and, 
therefore, as we have no traces of any other being than the 
universe, directly or indirectly, exhibits to us, the designing 
power is not to our reason more than one ; since in every 
thing which we behold, there is unity of that design, from 
which alone we have any reason to infer a designer. The 
laws of motion which prevail on our earth, prevail equally 
wherever we are capable of discovering motion. On our 
own earth, where our observation is so ample in the infinity 
of objects around us, there is no irregularity or opposition 
of contrivances, but all have proportions or analogies which 
mark them as the result of one harmonious design. There 
may be many spiritual beings of greater or less excellence, 
though there is no evidence of them in nature ; for where 
there is no evidence whatever, it is as absurd to deny abso- 
lutely as to affirm. But there is, as I have said, no 
evidence of any such beings ; and the designing power, then, 
as marked to us by all which we perceive in nature, is one, 
in the only sense in which the unity of the Supreme Being 
can be demonstrable, or even at all conceivable by us. The 
power of which we speak, exists to our reason, only as the 
author of the design which we trace ; and the design which 
we trace, various as it may be in the parts to which it 
extends, is all one harmonious contrivance. 

This designing unity, that is relative to what we see, is 
all, however, which we are logically entitled to infer from 
the phenomena ; for the absolute and necessary unity of 
the divine Power, as attempted to be proved by metaphy- 
sical arguments a priori, that are at best only a laborious 
trifling with words which either signify nothing or prove 
nothing, is more than, in our state of ignorance, indepen- 
dently of revelation, we are entitled to assert. The unity, 



380 



OF THE OMNISCIENCE OF THE DEITY. 



which alone, from the light of nature, we can with con- 
fidence assert, is hence not strictly exclusive, but wholly 
relative to that one design which we are capable of tracing 
in the frame of the universe. 

This one designing Power, we are accustomed to say, is 
omniscient ; and, in the only sense in which that phrase 
can have any meaning, when used by creatures so ignorant 
as ourselves, to signify our impossibility of discovering any 
limits to the wisdom which formed the magnificent design 
of the world, the phrase may be used as expressive only of 
admiration that is justly due to wisdom so sublime. He 
who formed the universe, and adapted it, in all its parts, 
for those gracious purposes to which it is subservient, must 
of course have known the relations which he established ; 
and knowing every relation of every thing existing, he may 
truly be said to be omniscient in his relation to every thing 
which exists. But it is in this definite sense only that the 
phrase has any meaning, as used by creatures, whose know- 
ledge is itself so very limited. Beyond this universe, it is 
presumptuous for man to venture, even in the homage 
which he offers. The absolute wisdom of the Deity, tran- 
scendent as it may be, when compared even with that noble 
display of it which is within us, and without us wherever 
we turn our eyes, we are incapable even of conceiving ; 
and admiring what we know, an awful veneration of what 
is unknown is all that remains for us. Our only meaning 
of the term Omniscience, then, does not arrogate to us any 
knowledge of those infinite relations which we assert the 
Deity to know : it is merely that the Supreme Being knows 
every relation of every existing thing, and that it is impos- 
sible for us to conceive any limit to his knowledge. 

His omnipotence, in like manner, as conceived by us, 
whatever it may be in reality, is not a power extending to 
circumstances, of which, from our own ignorance, we must 
be incapable of forming a conception ; but a power which 
has produced whatever exists, and to which we cannot dis- 



OF THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THE DEITY. 381 



cover any limit. It may be capable of producing renders, 
as far surpassing those which we perceive, as the whole 
fabric of the universe surpasses the little workmanship 
of mortal hands ; but the relation of the Deity to these 
unexisting or unknown objects, is beyond the feebleness 
of our praise, as it is beyond the arrogance of our con- 
ception. 

God, then, the author of the universe, exists. He 
exists, with a wisdom which could comprehend every thing 
that fills infinity in one great design ; with a power which 
could fill infinity itself with the splendid wonders that are, 
wherever we endeavour to extend our search. We know 
no limit to his wisdom, for all the knowledge which we 
are capable of acquiring flows from him as from its 
source ; we know nothing which can limit his power, for 
every thing of which we know the existence, is the work 
of his hand. 

God, then, thus wise and powerful exists, and we are 
subject to his sway. We are subject to his sway ; but, if 
all which we knew of his nature were his mere power and 
wisdom, the inquiry most interesting to us would still 
remain. The awful power, to which we perceive no limit, 
may be the sway of a tyrant, with greater means of tyranny 
than any earthly despot can possess ; or it may be the 
sway of a father, who has more than parental fondness, and 
a power of blessing far more extensive than any parental 
power, which is but a shadow, and a faint shadow, of the 
divine goodness that has conferred it. If we were suddenly 
carried away into captivity, and sold as slaves, how eager 
should we be to discover whether our taskmaster were 
kind or cruel, whether we could venture to look to him 
with hope, or only with the terror which they feel, who 
are to see constantly above them a power which is to be 
exercised only in oppression, or whose kindness of a 
moment is the short interval of hours of tyranny! But I 
will not use such an illustration in speaking of God and 



382 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



man. The paternal and filial relation is the only one 
which can be considered as faintly representing it; and to 
what son can it be indifferent whether his father be gentle 
or severe ? The goodness of God is, of all subjects of 
inquiry, that which is most interesting to U3. It is the 
goodness of him to whom we owe, not merely that we 
exist, but that we are happy or miserable now, and accord- 
ing to which we are to hope or fear for a future that is not 
limited to a few years, but extends through all the ages 
of immortality. Have we, then, reason to believe that 
God is good ? that the designing power, which it is im- 
possible for us not to perceive and admit, is a power of 
cruelty or kindness ? Of whom is this the question ? Of 
those whose whole life has been a continued display of the 
bountiful provision of Heaven, from the first moment at 
which life began. 

It is the inquiry of those who, by the goodness of that 
God whose goodness they question, found, on their very 
entrance into this scene of life, sources of friendship already 
provided for them, merely because they had wants that 
already required friendship ; whose first years were years 
of cheerfulness almost uninterrupted, as if existence were 
all that is necessary for happiness ; to whom, in after-life, 
almost every exertion which they were capable of making 
was a pleasure, and almost every object which met their 
eye, a source of direct gratification, or of knowledge, which 
was itself delightful ; who were not formed to be only thus 
selfishly happy, but seemed called, by some propitious 
voice of nature, to the diffusion of happiness, by the enjoy- 
ment which arose from that very diffusion, and warned 
from injuring others, by the pain which accompanied the 
very wish of doing evil, and the still greater pain of re- 
morse, when evil had at any time been intentionally 
inflicted. Nor is it to be counted a slight part of the 
goodness of God, that he has given us that very goodness 
as an object of our thought, and has thus opened to us, 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



383 



inexhaustibly, a pure and sublime pleasure in the contem- 
plation of those divine qualities, which are themselves the 
source of all the pleasures that we feel. 

Such is the goodness of God, in its relation to mankind, 
in infancy, in manhood, in every period of life. But we 
are not to think that the goodness of God extends only 
to man. The humblest life, which man despises, is not 
despised by him who made man of nothing, and all things of 
nothing, and " whose tender mercies are over all his works." 

Has God, thou fool, work'd solely for thy good, 
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food ? 
Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn, 
For him as kindly spread the flow'ry lawn. 
Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings ? 
Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings. 
Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat \ 
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note. 
The bounding steed you pompously bestride, 
Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride. 
Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain \ 
The birds of heaven shall vindicate their grain. 1 

In vain do we strive to represent to ourselves all nature 
as our own, and only our own. The happiness which we 
see the other races around us enjoying, is a proof that it is 
theirs as well as ours ; and that he, who has given us the 
dominion of all things that live on earth, has not forgotten 
the creatures which he has intrusted to our sway. Even 
in the deserts, in which our sway is not acknowledged — 
where the lion, if man approached, would see no lord before 
whom to tremble, but a creature far feebler than the 
ordinary victims of his hunger or his wrath, — in the dens 
and the wildernesses there are pleasures which owe nothing 
to us, but which are not the less felt by the fierce hearts 
that inhabit the dreadful recesses. They, too, have their 
happiness ; because they too were created by a Power that 



1 Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. iii. 27-38. 



384 OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



is good, and of whose beneficent design, in forming the 
world, with all its myriads of myriads of varied races of 
inhabitants, the happiness of these was a part. 

" Nor," as it has been truly said, " is the design abortive. 
It is a happy world, after all. The air, the earth, the 
water, teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon, 
or a summer evening, on which ever side I turn my eyes, 
myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view. c The 
insect youth are on the wing/ Swarms of new-born flies 
are trying their pinions in the air. Their sportive motions, 
their wanton mazes, their gratuitous activity, their con- 
tinual change of place without use or purpose, testify their 
joy, and the exultation which they feel in their lately dis- 
covered faculties. A bee amongst the flowers in spring, 
is one of the most cheerful objects that can be looked 
upon. Its life appears to be all enjoyment ; so busy and 
so pleased : yet it is only a specimen of insect life, with 
which, by reason of the animal being half-domesticated, 
we happen to be better acquainted than we are with that 
of others." 1 

Such is the seemingly happy existence of that minute 
species of life which is so abundant in every part of the 
great scene in which we dwell. I shall not attempt to 
trace the happiness upward, through all the alacrity and 
seeming delight in existence, of the larger animals, — an 
ever-flowing pleasure, of which those who have had the 
best opportunities of witnessing multitudes of gregarious 
animals feeding together, and rejoicing in their common 
pasture, will be the best able to appreciate the amount. 
All have means of enjoyment within themselves ; and, if 
man be the happy sovereign of the creation, he is not the 
sovereign of miserable subjects. 

Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine, 

Earth for whose use ? Pride answers, 'tis for mine. 

1 Paley's Natural Theology, p. 392. 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



SS5 



For me, kind Nature wakes her genial power. 
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower ; 
Annual for me, the grape, the rose, renew 
The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew ; 
For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings ; 
For me, health gushes from a thousand springs ; 
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise : 
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies. 1 

All these sources of blessings, that are infinite as the 
living beings that enjoy them, were made, indeed, for man, 
whose pride makes the arrogant exclusive assumption ; bur 
they were made also for innumerable beings, whose very 
existence is unknown to man, and who know not, in their 
turn, the existence of him who supposes that all these 
means of happiness are for himself alone. There is at 
every moment an amount of happiness on the earth, of 
which the happiness of all mankind is an element, indeed, 
but only one of many elements, that perhaps bears but a 
small proportion to the rest ; and it is not of this single 
element that we are to think, when we consider the bene- 
volence of that God who has willed the whole. 

It is this element of the universal happiness, however, 
with which we are best acquainted ; and when man is the 
inquirer, it is to this human part of course that we may 
suppose his attention to be chiefly turned. But man the 
enjoyer is very different from man the estimator of enjoy- 
ment. In making our estimate of happiness, we think 
only or chiefly of what is remarkable, not of what is 
ordinary ; as, in physics, we think of the rarer phenomena 
far more than of the appearances of nature which are 
every moment before our eyes. There are innumerable 
delights, therefore, of the senses, of the understanding, of 
the heart, which we forget, because they are delights to 
vrhich we are every hour accustomed, and which are shared 
with us by all mankind, or the greater number of man- 

1 Essay on Man, Ep. i. 131-140. 

«% S 



386 OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 

kind. It is what distinguishes us from our fellows that we 
consider; and this, the very circumstance of distinction 
necessarily limits to a few ; not what is common to us 
with our fellows, which, by the very wideness of the parti- 
cipation, is of an amount that is incomparably greater. 
We think of the benevolence of the Author of the whole 
race of mankind, therefore, as less than it is, because it is a 
benevolence that has provided for the whole race of man- 
kind ; and if the amount of good provided for every living 
being had been less in the extent of its diffusion, we should, 
in our erring estimate, have regarded it as more, at least if 
ourselves had been of the number of the privileged few, who 
alone enjoyed those general blessings of nature which now 
are common to all. 

" Non dat Deus beneficia? — unde ergo ista quae possides, 
quae das, quae negas, quae servas, quae rapis? unde hsec 
innumerabilia, oculos, aures, animum mulcentia? unde ilia 
luxuriam quoque instruens copia ? Neque enim necessita- 
tibus tantummodo nostris provisum est : usque in delicias 
amamur. — Si pauca quis tibi donasset jugera, accepisse te 
diceres beneficium : immensa terrarum late patentium 
spatia negas esse beneficium ! " 1 It is truly, as this 
eloquent writer says, the possession of the common glories 
of the earth, the sky, of all nature, that is before us and 
above us, which is the most valuable possession of man ; 
and the few acres which he enjoys, or thinks that he enjoys 
exclusively, compared with that greater gift of heaven to 
all mankind, are scarcely worthy of being counted as a 
proof of divine beneficence. 

But though life to man, and to his fellow-inhabitants of 
earth, be a source of happiness upon the whole, it is not 
always, and in every instance, a source of happiness. 
There is not a moment, indeed, in which the quantity of 
agreeable sensation felt by myriads of creatures, may not 



1 Seneca de Beneficiis, lib. iv. cap. v. vi. 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



S87 



be far greater than all the pain which is felt at the same 
moment ; but still there is no moment in which pain, and a 
very considerable amount of pain, is not felt. Can he be 
good, then, under whose supreme government, and there- 
fore almost, it may be said, at whose bidding, pain exists ? 
Before entering on this inquiry, however, it may be 
necessary to obviate an objection that arises from the mere 
limitation of our nature as finite beings. 

Many of the complaints of those who are discontented 
with the system of the universe, arise from this mere 
limitation of our faculties and enjoyments ; a limitation in 
which ingratitude would find an argument, in whatever 
state of being short of absolute divinity it might be placed ; 
and even though possessing all the functions of divinity 
from the moment at which it was created, might still look 
back through eternity, and complain with the same reason, 
that it had not been created earlier to the exercise of such 
sublime functions. 

It surely is not necessary, for the proof of benevolence 
on the part of the Divine Being, that man should be him- 
self a god ; that he should be omniscient or omnipotent, 
any more than that he should have existed from eternity. 
His senses, with all his other faculties, are limited, because 
they are the faculties of a created being ; as even his 
immortality may, in one sense of the word, be said to be 
limited, when considered in relation to the eternity that 
preceded his existence. But how admirably does even the 
limitation of his nature demonstrate the gracious benevolence 
of Heaven, when we consider the innumerable relations of 
the universe that must have been contrived, in adaptation 
to the exact degree of his capacity, so as to be most pro- 
ductive of good in these particular circumstances. If we 
think only how very slight a change in the qualities of 
external things, though perfectly suitable, perhaps, to a 
different degree of sensitive and intellectual capacity, might 
have rendered the existence of man absolutely miserable, 



S88 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



how sublimely benevolent seems that wisdom, in 4 he very 
minuteness of its care, which, by proportioning exactly the 
qualities of atoms to the qualities of that which, in the 
world of spirits, may be considered as scarcely more than 
what an atom is in the material world, bas produced, amid 
so many possibilities of misery, this result of happiness. 

You are probably all acquainted with the lines of Pope, 
so often quoted on this subject, that express briefly, and 
with great poetic force, the reasoning of Mr. Locke on this 
subject, which, perhaps, suggested them. 

The bliss of man, could pride that blessing find, 

Is, not to act or think beyond mankind ; 

No powers of body or of soul to share, 

But what his nature and his state can bear. 

Why has not man a microscopic eye ? 

For this plain reason, Man is not a fly. 

Say, what the use, were finer optics given, 

To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven 

Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er, 

To smart and agonize at every pore ; 

Or, quick effluvia darting through the brain, 

Die of a rose, in aromatic pain ? 

If nature thunder'd in his opening ears, 

And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres, 

How would he wish that heaven had left him still 

The whispering zephyr and the purling rill ! 1 

We see, then, the advantage of the adaptation of our 
limited powers to the particular circumstances of nature. 

But appearances of evil unquestionably exist, that are 
not to be ascribed to the mere limitation of our faculties, in 
relation to the finite system of things in which they are to 
be exercised. Let us now, then, proceed in part to the 
consideration of the question, as to the compatibility of 
these appearances with benevolence in the contriver of the 
universe. 



1 Essay on Man, Ep. i. 189-204, 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



389 



The objection to the goodness of the Supreme Being, 
involved in this question, of course proceeds on the suppo- 
sition that the Deity had the power of forming us differently; 
a power, therefore, which I need not stop to attempt to 
prove, since, unless this be taken for granted by the 
objector, the objection would be nugatory. 

But if the Deity had the power of forming us differently 
— if, for example, he could have so constituted our nature, 
that every object amid which we were placed must have 
been a source of pain — that habit, instead of lessening the 
sense of pain, had continually increased it — that, instead of 
an almost constant tendency to hope, we had had an equally 
constant tendency to the most gloomy apprehension — that 
we had felt pleasure in inflicting pain gratuitously, and 
remorse only if we had inadvertently done good, — if all 
this had been, it would surely have been a conclusion as 
just as obvious, that the contriver of this system of misery 
was, in his own nature, malevolent ; and any happiness 
which seemed slightly felt at times — especially if the happi- 
ness was the manifest result of a contrivance that, upon the 
whole, tended far more frequently to the production of pain 
— might, without any violation of the principles of sound 
philosophy, have been ascribed to an intention purely male- 
volent, as indicated by the general contrivance obviously 
adapted for the production of pain. If, in such a system of 
things, any one had contended for the benevolence of the 
Deity, from these few instances of pleasure, it would have 
been counted, as I cannot but think, a satisfactory answer, 
to have proved that the ordinary result of the contrivance 
must be pain ; and to have pointed out the manifest 
subserviency of the different parts of the contrivance to 
this cruel fmrpose. 

If this answer would be held valid, in the case now 
supposed, the opposite answer cannot be less valid, in the 
opposite circumstances in which we exist. I need not 
repeat, how much gratification we receive from the objects 



o90 OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 

around us, nor fill up that antithesis to the former statement, 
which would probably occur to yourselves, while I imagined 
and stated its various circumstances. I shall dwell only on 
the pain, that is the occasional result of the system of things 
as it is. Is this the result of a contrivance, of which pain 
seems to be the manifest object, or of a contrivance which 
is manifestly, in its general and obvious appearances, 
adapted for purposes of utility, and consequently of good- 
ness ? " Evil, no doubt, exists," says Paley, "but is never, 
that we can perceive, the object of contrivance. Teeth are 
contrived to eat, not to ache ; their aching now and then is 
incidental to the contrivance, perhaps inseparable from it ; 
or even, if you will, let it be called a defect in the con- 
trivance ; but it is not the object of it. This is a distinction 
which well deserves to be attended to. In describing 
implements of husbandry, you -would hardly say of the 
sickle, that it was made to cut the reaper's hand ; though, 
from the construction of the instrument, and the manner of 
using it, this mischief often follows. But, if you had 
occasion to describe instruments of torture, or execution, 
this engine, you would say, is to extend the sinews ; this 
to dislocate the joints ; this to break the bones ; this to 
scorch the soles of the feet. Here pain and misery are the 
very objects of the contrivance. Now, nothing of this sort 
is to be found in the frame of nature. We never discover 
a train of contrivance to bring about an evil purpose. No 
anatomist ever observed a system of organization calculated 
to produce pain and disease ; or, in explaining the parts of 
the human body, ever said, this is to irritate, this to inflame, 
this duct is to convey the gravel to the kidneys, this gland 
to secrete the humour which forms the gout. If, by chance, 
he come to a part of which he knows not the use, the most 
he can say is, that it is useless ; no one ever suspects that 
it is put there to incommode, to annoy, or to torment." 1 



1 Moral and Political Philosophy, book ii. chap. v. 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



391 



"When the direct object of all the great contrivances of 
nature, then, is so manifestly for beneficial purposes, it 
would be reasonable, even though no advantage could be 
traced as the consequence of the occasional evils of life, to 
ascribe these rather to purposes unknown to us, than to 
purposes that were malevolent. If the inhabitant of some 
other planet were to witness the kindness and solicitude of 
a father for his child in his long watchfulness of love, and 
were then to see the same parent force the child, notwith- 
standing its cries, to swallow some bitter potion, he would 
surely conclude, not that the father was cruel, but that the 
child was to derive benefit from the very potion which he 
loathed. What that benefit was, indeed, it would be 
impossible for him to conceive, but he would not conceive 
the less that the intention was benevolent. He would feel 
his own ignorance of the constitution of things on earth, 
and would be confident, that if he knew this constitution 
better, the seeming inconsistency of the affection, and the 
production of suffering, would be removed. 

Such a presumption would be reasonable, even though 
we were incapable of discovering, in many cases, the 
advantage to which the seeming evil is subservient. It is 
very evident, that he only who knows all the relations of 
the parts of the universe, can justly appreciate the universe, 
and say with confidence of any part of it, It were better 
that this had not been. In our state of partial and very 
limited knowledge, if we say this of any part of the wonder- 
ful mechanism, we may perhaps say it of that which, not 
being, the happiness of millions would have been destroyed : 
we may say it even of that, the loss of which would be the 
confusion of all the systems of the universe. 
Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly, 
Planets and suns run lawless through the sky ; 
Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurled, 
Being on being wreck'd, and world on world ; 
Heaven's whole foundations to their centre nod, 
And nature tremble to the throne of God. 



192 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



All this dread order break, for whom ? for thee ? 
Vile worm ! Oh ! madness, pride, impiety ! 1 

What should we think of him, who, fixing his whole atten- 
tion on the dim figures in the background of a great picture, 
should say, that the artist had no excellence, because these 
figures had little resemblance to the clear outline of the 
men and horses that seemed in tended to be represented by 
them! All which would be necessary to vindicate the 
artist, would not be to make the slightest alteration in 
these figures, but to point out to the observer the foreground, 
and to bid him comprehend the whole picture in a glance. 
The universe is, if I may so express it, such a picture, but 
a picture far too large to be comprehended in our little gaze; 
the parts which we see have always some relation to parts 
which we do not see : and, if all these relations could be 
seen by us, there can be no doubt that the universe would 
then appear to us very different, as different, perhaps, as 
the picture seems to him who has looked only on the back- 
ground, and who afterwards surveys the whole. 

All reasoning of this kind, however, that is founded 
merely on our impossibility of accurate knowledge, is, I 
am aware, and am ready to admit, of little weight, unless 
where there is so decided a superiority of good or evil in 
the parts that may be conceived to be in a great measure 
known, as to leave no reasonable doubt as to the nature of 
the parts or relations of parts that are unknown. It is on 
this account, and on this account only, I consider it as of 
peculiar force in the present instance : for I surely need 
not say, after the remarks already made, how strong are 
the appearances of benevolent intention in the system of 
the universe, in all those manifest contrivances, of which 
we are able clearly to discover the object. 

The Divine Being who has contrived a system, that must 
thus, on every hypothesis, be allowed to be productive of 



1 Pope's Essay on Man, Ep, i. 251-258. 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



much good to man, must be benevolent, malevolent, or 
indifferent, or capriciously benevolent and malevolent. 
That he is not indifferent, every contrivance itself shows. 
That he is not capricious, is shown by the uniformity of all 
the laws of nature, since the world has been a subject of 
human observation. That he is not malevolent, the far 
greater proportion of the marks of benevolent intention 
sufficiently indicates ; and since his benevolence, therefore, 
is not capricious, the only remaining supposition is, that it 
is the permanent character of the divine mind. 

The presumption, then, as to the goodness of God, even 
in the apparent evils of the system in which man is placed. / 
would be a reasonable presumption, though, with our 
limited comprehension, we were incapable of discovering 
the advantages that flow from these particular seeming 
evils. What we see clearly might be regarded as throwing 
light on other parts of the immense whole, which are too 
dim for our feeble vision. 

When a fair estimate, then, has been made of all the 
indications of the moral character of its author, which the 
universe exhibits, it is logically wise to infer, in many 
cases, a goodness that is not immediately apparent in the 
particular results. But, feeble as our faculties are, they 
are not so weak of vision and comprehension as to be 
incapable of distinguishing many of the relations of 
apparent evil to real good. There are many evils, that is 
to say, qualities productive of uneasiness, which the 
ignorant, indeed, might wish removed, but which those 
who have a little more knowledge would w 7 ish to continue, 
though the continuance or the disappearance of them 
depended on their mere will ; and every discovery of this 
sort w r hich we make, adds new force to that general 
presumption of goodness, which, even though we had 
been incapable of making any such discovery, would have 
been justified by the general character of benevolent 
intention, in the obvious contrivances of the universe. In 

s2 



394 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



treating of our appetites, I took occasion to explain to you 
the importance of the uneasy feelings which form a part of 
them. The ignorant, perhaps, might wish these removed, 
merely because they are uneasy feelings, though it is only 
as uneasy feelings they are valuable. The evils which we 
too might wish removed, are, perhaps, as important in their 
general relations, which we do not perceive, as hunger and 
thirst are in those relations, of which the vulgar do not 
think, and may almost be said, from their habits, to be 
incapable of thinking. 

The analogy of many of the ills of life in their beneficial 
relation to our pains of appetite, is, indeed, very striking. 
Without the uneasiness of ungratified desire in general, 
how feeble, in many ,cases, would be the delight of the 
gratification itself ! He, certainly, would not consult well 
for human happiness, by whom every human desire, if it 
were in his power, would be rooted from the breast. 

It is in its relation to the enjoyments of conscious moral 
agency, however, that the existence of so much seeming- 
evil in the world finds its best solution. To this I shall 
proceed in my next Lecture. 



LECTUEE XXII. 

OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY — OBJECTIONS OBVIATED. 

In my last Lecture I considered the evidence which the 
universe exhibits of the goodness of its Author, — a goodness 
, which, limited in its extent only by the limits of the 
universe itself, is present with us wherever we turn our 
eyes ; since there is not a result of the wisdom and power 
of God which is not, in its consequences, direct or indirect, 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



395 



an exhibition of some contrivance, for the moral or physical 
advantage of his creatures. 

Though every thing which we behold, however, may, in 
its general relations, tend to this benevolent purpose, good, 
or at least what seems to be good, is far from being in every 
case the immediate result. There is misery in the world as 
truly as there is happiness in the world ; and he who denies 
the one, as a mere phenomenon of the living scene in which 
he is placed, might with as much reason deny the other. 
Whence, then, is this evil, has been the question of every 
age, that has been capable of inquiries beyond those which 
originate in mere animal necessity. 

That Eternal Mind, 
From passions, wants, and envy, far estranged, 
Who built the spacious universe, and deck'd 
Each part so richly with whate'er pertains 
To life, to health, to pleasure, — why bade he 
The viper Evil, creeping in, pollute 
The goodly scene ; and, with insidious rage, 
While the poor inmate looks around and smiles, 
Dart her fell sting, with poison to his soul ? 1 

Such has been the question of ages ; and if, for answer 
to it, in accordance with belief of the goodness of the Deity, 
it be necessary that the particular advantage of each 
particular seeming evil be precisely demonstrated, it must 
be confessed that no answer has yet been given to it by 
philosophy ; and that, in this sense, probably the question 
must continue unanswered, as long at least as man is a 
creature of this earth. To be able to answer it in this 
sense, indeed, would imply a knowledge of all the relations 
of all existing things, which is possible only to a being 
that can look upon the future still more clearly than man 
with his dim memory is permitted to look upon the past. 
But though we cannot state precisely a particular advan- 

1 Pleasures of Imagination, book iii. 



396 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



tage of each seeming evil, we can at least infer, from the 
general appearances of nature, and the more minute and 
intimate contrivances which it exhibits, the moral character 
of that Power which has formed us ; so as to know of any 
particular contrivance, the particular effects of which we 
may be incapable of tracing, whether he who designed it as 
a part of a system was one who willed, or did not will, the 
happiness of mankind. We may infer it certainly with as 
great accuracy, or far greater, than that with which we 
infer the benevolent or malevolent disposition of our friends 
or foes ; and, if it be reasonable in the case of a friend, 
whose kindness has been the source of the chief happiness 
of our life, to infer, in some cases, in which we might have 
doubted of the intentions of others, — that his intentions 
might have been friendly to us, even when we suffer by 
the immediate results of his actions ; that confidence which 
we should blush not to feel in the case of an earthly friend, 
who, though known to us by long intimacy of mutual 
regard, may yet have been influenced by rivalries of 
interest or momentary passion, is surely not less reasonable, 
when he, in whom we confide, is the only friend that 
cannot have with us any rival interests, — a friend to whom 
we are indebted for every thing which we possess, even for 
the delights of those cordial intimacies, and for that very 
confidence which we think it the baseness of dishonour to 
withhold from any friend, but from that one who alone 
deserves it fully. It is surely not too much to claim for 
God, what, in the ordinary circumstances of society, we 
should regard as in some measure ignominious to deny to 
man ; or at least, if it seem too much for human gratitude 
to extend this trust to its first of benefactors, let us not 
have the selfish inconsistency of daring to claim from our 
own friends a confidence, which, in circumstances of far less 
equivocal obligation, we consider it only as wise and virtu- 
ous to deny to God. 

That, in all the innumerable contrivances of nature, in 



I 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 397 

the wonderful mechanism of the living frame, there is not 
one of which the production of injury seems to have been 
the direct object, whatever occasional evil may indirectly 
arise from it ; and that there are innumerable contrivances, 
of which the direct object is manifestly beneficial, may be 
regarded as a sufficient proof of the general disposition and 
gracious intention of him, to whose power and wisdom 
we ascribe these contrivances. In my last lecture, I 
endeavoured to picture to you a constitution of things, 
exactly the opposite of that which at present subsists ; in 
which the evident direct object of every contrivance was 
the production of misery, — in which, in this misery, man, 
instead of the constant tendency to hope which now 
comforts him in affliction, had an equally constant tendency 
to despair, and become more keenly sensible to pain, the 
more he had been habituated to it ; and as, in that case, 
where the direct object of every contrivance was manifestly 
injurious, no one would infer benevolence from any occa- 
sional tendency of the laws of that contrivance, to produce 
some slight gratification to the sufferer, when the incidental 
pleasure flowed from the same principle which produced 
the general anguish ; so, in the present constitution of 
things, in which the direct object of every contrivance is 
beneficial to man, there is surely as little reason to infer 
any malevolent desire, from evils that arise in consequence 
of a general provision, which is, in all those general 
circumstances, to which it manifestly relates, decidedly 
productive of good. 

The supreme orderer of the frame of nature, as I have 
said, is not capricious ; for the laws which now regulate 
the universe, are the same which have been observed since 
man was an observer. He is not indifferent to the happi- 
ness or misery of man, for man exists as a being capable 
of happiness or misery ; and every relation, or almost 
every relation, which connects man with the living or 
inanimate objects around him, is productive to him, 



398 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



directly or indirectly, of some pleasure or pain. Equally 
evident is it, that He, whose general arrangements are all 
directly indicative of purposes of utility, that are only 
incidentally combined with any seeming evil, is not one 
who has willed, as the object of those arrangements, the 
misery of his living creatures ; and if he be not malevolent, 
indifferent, nor capricious, he is and must be permanently 
benevolent, and the seeming evil has not been willed as 
evil. We are bound, therefore, not more by gratitude than 
by sound philosophy, to confide in the gracious intentions 
of Heaven, even when the graciousness of those intentions 
is to be determined, not by a particular result, that of itself, 
if it had existed alone, might not have seemed indicative of 
it, but by the general indications of moral character which 
the system, as a whole, exhibits. 

An inference and extension of this kind, I have admitted, 
would not be reasonable, however, unless when the indica- 
tions of gracious intention prevailed with indubitable 
superiority. But of this superiority, in the physical 
relations of things, who can doubt, who estimates the 
beneficent arrangements of the Author of the universe with 
half the candour with which he estimates the conduct and 
the character of a common earthly friend ? 

The operations of nature are not arbitrary, so as to vary 
with the particular circumstances of the individual and of 
the moment ; and if it be of importance for man to be a 
designing agent, to have the noble consciousness of acting 
according to his own desire, and not to be the mere passive 
subject even of pleasure itself, — which he who can doubt 
is scarcely worthy of the name of man, — it is evidently of 
importance that the phenomena of nature should thus take 
place, according to general laws, that, by his foresight of 
their results, he may regulate his conduct in adaptation to 
them. The law, or regular arrangement of the sequences 
of events in nature, which produces good upon the whole, 
is not to be suspended, because it may, to an individual 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 399 

in particular circumstances, be productive of evil ; since, if 
it were thus variable, no one could even guess what the 
result could be in any combination of circumstances ; and 
the evil which would arise from this uncertainty to the 
whole race of mankind, would unquestionably be far 
greater than the evil that might arise to a single individual, 
from the uniformity, in cases in which it might, to that 
particular individual, at that particular moment, have been 
profitable that the law were suspended. 

Think we, like some weak prince, the Eternal Cause, 
Prone for his fav'rites to reverse his laws ? 
Shall burning iEtna, if a sage requires, 
Forget to thunder and recall her fires I 
On air or sea, new motions be imprest, 
blameless Bethel, to relieve thy breast ? 
When the loose mountain trembles from on high, 
Shall gravitation cease, if you go by 1 1 

It is quite evident that even Omnipotence itself, which 
cannot do what is contradictory, cannot combine both 
advantages, — the advantage of regular order in the 
sequences of nature, and the advantage of an uniform 
adaptation of the particular circumstances of the moment,, 
to the particular circumstances of the individual. We may 
take our choice, but we cannot think of a combination of 
both ; and if, as is very obvious, the greater advantage be 
that of uniformity of operation, we must not complain of 
evils to which that very uniformity, which we could not 
fail to prefer if the option had been allowed to us, has been 
the very circumstance that gave rise. You cannot fail to 
perceive of yourselves how much of that which we term 
evil is referable to this circumstance alone, — a circumstance 
which, in every instance, occasions to us momentary suffer- 
ing indeed, but which, in every instance, leaves to us, or 
rather confers on us, the glorious privilege of conscious 



1 Essay on Man, Ep. iv. 121-128. 



400 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



agency, of that agency with design, which implies a fore- 
knowledge of certain events, as the consequents of certain 
other antecedent events. That the phenomena of nature 
should take place, then, according to general laws, and 
should not be various according to the particular circum- 
stances of the individuals, to whom a temporary accom- 
modation of them might seem more advantageous in some 
particular cases, is so obvious, if man is to be at all a 
reflecting and conscious agent, that I conceive it unneces- 
sary to dwell at any length on the demonstration of it. 

But general laws, it will be said, might have been framed, 
possessing all the advantages of regularity, and productive 
of less suffering. Is there any advantage, then, of suffering 
itself, that may reconcile it, more readily at least, with 
that divine goodness, the reality of which, as a quality of 
him to whose sway we are subject, it is so delightful to 
believe ? 

There are such relations of occasional suffering to lasting 
advantage, which, in many most important respects, could 
not exist but for the suffering, and for which all the suffer- 
ing itself is not too dear a price. 

The great advantage is to be found in the exercise of 
virtues, to which suffering, or the risk of suffering, is essen- 
tial, and in all the enjoyment that flows from the conscious- 
ness of these virtues in ourselves, and from our admiration 
of them as displayed by others. 

But, though this relation to moral character is unquestion- 
ably the chief advantage, and that which might of itself be 
sufficient to account, in a great measure, for the mixture of 
apparent evil in the universe, it is not perhaps all. I can- 
not but think likewise, that, independently of such moral 
advantages, some estimate is to be made of the relation 
which many of our physical evils bear to our mere mor- 
tality, as necessary for the production of successive races of 
mankind. On this relation, therefore, inconsiderable as it 
is, when compared with the moral advantage which we are 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



401 



afterwards to examine, a few remarks may not be absolutely 
unimportant. 

It is of advantage^ upon the whole, if the earth, in either 
way, were to support exactly the same number of inha- 
bitants, that there should be a succession of races, rather 
than one continued race. In the case of man, for 
example, of which we can best speak, — though we omit 
all consideration of the multitude of beings who are thus 
transmitted, after what is perhaps a necessary prepara- 
tion, to a scene of higher existence, and think merely of 
the circumstances of this earth, — how much of human 
happiness would be destroyed, but for such a provision 
of alternate weakness to be sheltered, and love to be 
the guardian of weakness. Where there is no succession 
of races, all filial and parental and consanguineal rela- 
tions of every sort are, of course, out of the question ; 
and, consequently, all the happiness which such relations 
bestow. Indeed, in a long life of this kind, all the 
associations which are now productive of so much delight, 
would probably be wholly powerless. The home of fifty 
or a hundred years would cease perhaps to be our home ; 
and be succeeded by so many other homes of the same 
period, that the effect on our feelings, thus divided among 
so many scenes, would be the same as if we had no country 
or home whatever. As things are at present, there is not 
a moment in which thousands of our kind are not deriving 
pleasure from an infinity of objects, that, to an immortal 
race of beings similar to us in every respect but mortality, 
would long have ceased to afford gratification. There is a 
constant succession of new spirits, full of all the alacrity of 
new existence, and enjoying the delight of new objects; 
and the contemplation of this very scene, so beautifully 
diversified with the quick hopes of youth, and the slower 
deliberative wisdom of manhood, is one of the chief plea^ 
sures which the universe, as an object of thought, affords. 



402 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



But, though nothing more were gained than the mere rela- 
tions of consanguinity, to which the present system gives 
rise, who could hesitate for a moment in determining by 
which of the two systems the greater good would be pro- 
duced, — by an almost immortal earthly existence, coeval 
with the whole system of earthly things, or by that shorter 
mortality which allows, therefore, room for successive gene- 
rations, and for all the kind affections which these genera- 
tions, as they successively arise, evolve ? To remove from 
life that tenderness which flows from the protection and 
instruction of infancy, and that tenderness which is reflected 
back from the little smiler who is the object of it, to all who 
are smiling around him, would be, in its ultimate effects on 
the maturer feelings of manhood, to destroy not the happi- 
ness merely, but half the virtue of mankind. 

The very briefness of life, afflicting as it is in many cases, 
is, in some cases, — which, comparatively few as they may 
be, are not to be neglected in our general estimate, — essen- 
tial to comfort. There are situations in which hope, that 
is so little apt to desert the afflicted, scarcely arises, unless 
when it speaks of other scenes, and in which death, the 
opener of immortality, is hailed as that gracious comforter 
who receives the combatant when the warfare of life is 
over ; and, preparing for him at once the couch and the 
laurel, leads him to glory in leading him to repose. 

I need not pause, however, to state the various advan- 
tages arising from a succession of races on earth, rather 
than an unvarying number. I may very safely consider 
you as taking this for granted. 

If it be of advantage, then, that one generation of man- 
kind should successively yield its place to another genera- 
tion, the question comes to be, in what manner it is most 
* expedient that death should take place ? That, in what- 
ever way it take place, it is most expedient, upon the 
whole, that it should occur according to some general law, 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



403 



and not capriciously, I may consider as already proved ; 
and the question therefore is, what general provision for 
this great change would be most advantageous ? 

It is evident, in the first place, that if life had followed 
a certain exact proportion in point of time, — if, like a 
clock, for example, that is wound up so as to tell the hour 
for a certain number of days, and then to cease wholly its 
motion, human life had ceased at a certain exact beat of 
the pulse, and could not cease but at that particular 
moment, all the advantage which arises from the uncer- 
tainty of the period of death must have been lost. Till the 
moment approached there could be no fear, and conse- 
quently no restraint, which fear alone imposes ; and when 
the period approached, life, if its continuation were at all 
an object of desire, could be only the sad calculation of the 
condemned criminal, who makes miserable every moment 
that passes, by the thought that he is on the point of losing 
it ; though to lose such a moment, or at least a succession 
of such moments, is itself no slight gain. By that provision 
which has made death uncertain in its period, man does not 
suspend his labours, and consequently withdraw his portion 
of service from mankind, till the last moment in which he 
can be useful. " Sepulchri immemor, struit domos." He 
may toil for himself, indeed, in executing these vain pro- 
jects ; but, in toiling for himself, he toils also for society. 

It is of no slight importance, then, for the happiness both 
of the individual himself, and of those around him, and thus 
of society in general, that the moment of death should not 
be exactly foreseen. It must be made to depend, therefore, 
on circumstances in the physical constitution of individuals, 
which may arise or be readily induced at any time. It 
becomes a question, accordingly, whether these circum- 
stances should be agreeable, indifferent, or disagreeable, — 
in short, whether there should be any malady preceding 
death. 

If the train of symptoms that constitute what we now 



404 



OF THE GOODNESS OF TEE DEITY. 



term disease, were indifferent or agreeable, I need scarcely 
say bow much of the salutary fear of death itself would be 
removed. It is not a mere separation from life, which is 
commonly considered under that name, but a combination 
of many image?, which produce a far more powerful effect 
than the single image of death. The brave man, in the 
most perilous field of battle, it has hence often been 
remarked, is a coward, perhaps, on the bed of sickness. 
There was death, indeed, or the very near prospect of 
death, before him in both cases ; but in the one case, death 
was combined with images that made it scarcely terrible ; 
in the other case, with images more terrifying than itself. 
If. by exposure to the common causes of disease at present, 
we were to expose ourselves only to a succession of delight- 
ful feelings, how rash would those be, who are even at pre- 
sent rash : and, even when the series of delightful feelings 
had begun, how little power comparatively would these 
have in exciting to the exertion that might be necessary 
for suspending their course. If hunger had been pleasing, 
who would have hastened as now to satisfy the appetite • 
and, with respect to mortality, all the slight maladies result- 
ing from exposure to causes of injury, may be considered as 
resembling the pain of hunger, that points out approaching 
evil, and warns how to obviate it. It is necessary, indeed, 
for the welfare of society, that death should not be exactly 
foreseen: but it is necessary for its welfare also, that it 
should not be so very sudden and frequent, as to prevent 
a sufficient reliance on the continued co-operation of others, 
in the ordinary business of the world. The present consti- 
tution of things seems, even when considered only in its 
civil relations, admirably adapted for such a medium as is 
requisite ; giving to the circumstances that precede death 
.that moderate terror which is necessary for saving from 
rash exposure to them, and still leaving death itself as an 
event, which it is in our power to avert perhaps for a time, 
but not wholly to avoid: 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



405 



All the advantage, however, which is thus produced by 
the painful maladies of life, I readily confess, would be too 
slight to put in the balance with the amount of pain which 
arises from these maladies. But it is still a circumstance, 
and an important one, to be placed in the scale, though it 
be not sufficient to produce a preponderance or an equipoise. 
The true preponderating weight, compared with which every 
other circumstance seems almost insignificant, is that which 
I have next to consider — the relation of pain to moral 
character. 

It is of advantage to the moral character in two ways ; 
as warning from vice by the penalties attached to vicious 
conduct, and as giving strength to virtue, by the benevo- 
lent wishes which it awakes and fosters, and by the very 
sufferings themselves which are borne with a feeling of 
moral approbation. 

That pain, in many instances, warns and saves from vice, 
I scarcely stop to prove. It is in this way, indeed, that 
our bodily ailments become morally so important. How 
much of temperance arises from them ! The headach, the 
sickness, the languor, the more lasting disease, may, indeed, 
have little effect in overcoming habits of confirmed de- 
bauchery ; but, which is of far more importance, how 
many slight and temporary indulgences in vice do they 
prevent from being confirmed into habits ! How many 
ingenuous and noble minds are there, which, at a period 
of life when it is so difficult to resist example that offers 
itself in the seductive form of pleasure, would pass from 
excess to excess, and lose gradually all capacity of better 
wishes, but for those ailments which may be considered 
almost as a sort of bodily conscience — a conscience that 
reproaches for the past, and that, in reproaching for the 
past, calls to beware of the future ! In addition to this % 
however, as warning not from intemperance merely, but 
from every species of vice, is the conscience which most 
truly deserves that name — the sense of self-degradation, 



406 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



when we have acted in a manner unworthy of a being so 
nobly gifted ; that dreadful voice which it is impossible to 
fly, because it is with us wherever we may fly, and which 
we can still only in one manner — by acting so as to merit, 
not its silence only, but its applause. 

Such, independently of the beneficial influence of the fears 
of futurity which religion superadds, are the advantages of 
pain, as warning from vice. By the kindness of our 
Creator there is a connexion established between that 
bodily indulgence, which does not merely occupy the time 
of virtue, but renders us incapable of virtue, and a bodily 
uneasiness, that reminds us for what more important pur- 
poses we were formed ; and, by a still more salutary pro- 
vision, there is a connexion still more permanent, by which 
the commission of a single crime is to us for ever after, in 
the painful remorse that is felt by us, an exhortation to 
virtue, and an exhortation that is more urgent and effica- 
cious as the painful remorse itself is more severe. 

The advantage of suffering, then, as a warning from vice, 
is sufficiently obvious ; at least in that constitution of things 
in which man is capable of vice and virtue. 

But, in such a constitution of things, is it less necessary 
for the formation of virtue itself ; of that noble virtue which 
alone is worthy of man — a virtue that feels for the sorrows 
of others, and that bears its own, that can see a thousand 
pleasures tempting it from duty, and can look on them with 
as little desire as it would feel to quit its path when hasten- 
ing to discharge some high office, merely to gather a few 
wild flowers that were blooming at a distance — a virtue, 
to which there may be peril but not fear, that sees nothing 
truly worthy of being dreaded but vice, and that counts 
no suffering above its strength which has conscience for its 
support, and God for its approver ? 

When we look on some father of a family on his bed of 
sickness, what is it that we see ? There are, indeed, the 
obvious characters of suffering. On his own countenance 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



407 



there is that paleness which seems as if it scarcely knew 
how to smile, and there is, perhaps, in his eye a sadness of 
more than disease ; a sadness which has its cause, not in 
his own heart, but in the hearts of others. On the faces of 
those around him there is no look but of grief; for the hope 
that may rise at times is but the feeling of a moment, and 
is not sufficiently lasting to alter the fixed character of the 
melancholy countenance. All that our mere eyes behold 
then is grief. But do our hearts, when our eyes are thus 
occupied with an aspect of evil, see nothing more ? Do 
they not look beyond the moment, and perceive virtue 
present as truly as sorrow, and diffusing her better influence, 
which is not to be lost even when the grief has passed away ? 
The little bosoms around that bed have already acquired a 
benefit of which they are not conscious ; and, even when 
this hour is not present to them, the gentleness of this hour 
will still remain. There will be a quicker disposition to 
feel for others what they have themselves suffered, a warmer 
love for those who have wept with them together, a patience 
more ready to endure, from the remembrance of that ven- 
erable form, who, in resigning his spirit to God, resigned 
with meek submission, to the same almighty care, the hap- 
piness of many, whose happiness, far dearer to him than 
his own, was the last object which earth presented to his 
thought. 

If the kind affections be blessings to the heart which feels 
them — blessings, of which the heart must be unworthy, 
indeed, that would divest itself of them, for all the happiness 
of another kind with which the most sensual would decorate 
to themselves a world of gaudy felicity, in which passive 
pleasure was all that was to be known, without one virtue 
to be felt, and consequently, without one virtuous act to be 
remembered, — if the kind affections be so inestimable, that 
also must be inestimable, by which these affections* are best 
promoted. The grief of one, it must be remembered, may 
be the pity of many, and may foster, therefore, the bene- 



408 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



volence of many, — so careful is nature to produce what is 
good in itself, at the least expense of individual suffering. 
But there must be grief if there be pity, and without occa- 
sional feelings of pity there is comparatively little regard. 
For which child is it, that the heart of the mother, who 
strives to divide her attentions equally, feels in secret, not- 
withstanding every effort to equalize her love, the warmest 
attachment ? It is for that one which has been feeble from 
infancy, which has existed only by her continued care, 
which has deprived her of most hours of occupation or 
amusement abroad, of most hours, at night, of repose. This 
single instance might be sufficient to show the relation of 
pity to the growth of benevolent affection in general. There 
is not a house of suffering, which is not, by the very suffer- 
ing which it presents, a school of virtue ; and we do not 
distinguish the influence on our moral character which such 
lessons produce, merely because the influence is the result 
of innumerable lessons, the effect of each of which is slight, 
though, without the whole, there could be little affection of 
any sort. It is like the influence of the dew on the plant. 
We do not trace the operation of a siugle drop of moisture : 
but we know that, without the cherishing influence of many 
such drops, there could not be that flower which is at once 
so beautiful and so fragrant. 

If we love, then, the benevolent affections, we must not 
repine that there exists, in nature, that which gives birth 
to those affections, and which calls them into exercise. 

Vain are thy thoughts, child of mortal birth, 
And impotent thy tongue. Is thy short span 
Capacious of this universal frame ? 
Thy wisdom all-sufficient 2 Thou, alas ! 
Dost thou aspire to judge between the Lord 
Of nature and his works ? To lift thy voice 
Against the sov'reign order he decreed 
All good and lovely ? — To blaspheme the bands 
Of tenderness innate, and social love, 
Holiest of things ; — by which the general orb 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



409 



Of being, as by adamantine links, 

Was drawn to perfect union, and sustain'd 

From everlasting ? Hast thou felt the pangs 

Of softening sorrow, of indignant zeal 

So grievous to the soul, as thence to wish 

The ties of nature broken from thy frame, — 

That so thy selfish, unrelenting heart 

Might cease to mourn its lot, — no longer then 

The wretched heir of evils not its own ? 

fair benevolence of generous minds ! 

O man, by nature form'd for all mankind ! 1 

Such is the influence of suffering, in producing, or at 
least cherishing into far greater vividness of affection, the 
virtues of benevolence, and consequently its influence in 
increasing the delight which the benevolent affec 3, so 
richly, or rather so inexhaustibly, afford. But if its influ- 
ence be decidedly favourable to this class of virtues, it is 
far more essential to the virtues of self-command. It is 
adversity in some one of its modifications which alone 
teaches us what we are. We must be in situations in which 
it is perilous to act, before we can know that we have the 
courage wdiich is necessary for acting ; w t o must engage 
with fortune before we know that we have the power of 
being its victor. It is for this reason that Seneca accounts 
him the most unhappy of mankind, whom the gods have 
not honoured with adversity, as worthy of subduing it. 
" Nihil infelicius mihi videtur eo, cui nihil unquarn evenit 
adversi. Non licuit enim illi se experiri : ut ex voto illi 
fluxerint omnia, ut ante votum ; male tamen de illo dii 
judicaverunt. Indignus visus est, a quo vinceretur fortuna/' 2 

There are griefs which we pity, and which it is virtue to 
pity. But who is there that has ever dared to pity Mutius 
Scaevola, when he. placed his hand in the flame ; Regulus, 
when he returned to torture ; Arria, when she fixed the 
poniard in her breast, and said so truly, Non dolei ? 

1 Pleasures of Imagination, book ii. 

2 De Providentia, cap. iii. 

T 



410 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



Should we not feel, in presuming to pity what common 
minds might shrink to behold, or shrink even to conceive, 
that we were guilty of a sort of insult to the magnanimity 
which we admired ? There is a voice within us which 
would say, how enviable is that glorious spirit ! and cow- 
ardly as our souls are, there is only the feeblest of mankind 
that could think of classing virtue, victorious over every 
sorrow which assails it, as on a level even with the empire 
of the world, if that empire were to be possessed by one, 
who could inflict torture, indeed, on thousands, but who 
would tremble at the thought of suffering one of the evils 
which he inflicts, though that evil were the slightest which 
could be inflicted, and the moral object for which he was 
called to suffer it, the noblest for which man could suffer. 

In vain, therefore, do we strive to say that God, if he be 
good, should produce happiness only. He should indeed 
produce happiness ; but if he should produce happiness, 
that is to say, what the world counts happiness, he should 
still more produce that which even the world itself regards 
with an admiration still greater than prosperity itself in its 
most flattering form. The very throbbing of our heart, at 
the tale of fortitude, confutes our querulous impiety. It 
tells us, that even we esteem it nobler to be placed in 
situations in which we may exercise virtue with the con- 
sciousness that we are acting as beseems man, and with 
the approbation of all who are themselves worthy of 
approbation, than to be placed in situations in which we 
have envy, indeed, but the envy only of those who think 
of our fortune, and not of ourselves. Our hearts then tell 
us, that the world in which man is best placed, is a world 
like that in which he is placed — a world in which, though 
he may occasionally have to struggle with affliction, he 
• may in that very struggle have the delight of knowing,' 
that he is more virtuous to-day than he was yesterday ; 
that he is rising in excellence ; that there are multitudes 
whom his example will animate to similar victory over 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 411 

that evil within the heart, which is the only evil that 
deserves our detestation or our fear ; and that he has be- 
come less unworthy of admission into the presence of that 
God, whose presence, when virtue is admitted to it, is at 
once immortality and joy. 

If, in contrast with such a character, we were to strive 
to form to ourselves a picture of life without one suffering, 
but without one benevolent feeling, or one joy of conscience, 
why is it that we should blush to ourselves, in preferring 
such a life, and that we join internally with such conscious 
approbation in that great prayer, which Juvenal offers to 
us as all that is worthy of man ? 

Fortem posce animum, mortis terrore carentem ; 
Qui spatium vitae extremum inter munera ponat 
Naturae, qui ferre queat quoscunque labores, 
Nesciat irasei, eupiat nihil, et potiores 
Herculis aerumnas credat saevosque labores, 
Et venere, et coenis, et pluma Sardanapali. 1 

" Ask thy own heart," says Akenside, after describing, 
in one of the most splendid passages of his poem, the admi- 
ration with which we still enter into the fortunes of the 
heroic states of antiquity, and the sorrow and indignation 
which we feel in thinking of the tyranny before which they 
sunk, — . 

Thus defaced, 
Thus widely mournful, when the prospect thrills 
Thy beating bosom, when the patriot's tear 
Starts from thine eye, and thy extended arm 
In fancy hurls the thunderbolt of Jove 
To fire the impious wreath on Philip's brow, 
Or dash Octavius from his trophied car ; 
Say, does thy secret soul repine to taste 
The big distress \ Or would'st thou then exchange 
Those heart-ennobling sorrows for the lot 
Of him who sits amid the gaudy herd 



1 Sat. x. 357-362. 



412 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



Of mute barbarians bending to his nod, 

And bears aloft his gold-invested front, 

And says within himself, "lama king? 

And wherefore should the clamorous voice of wo 

Intrude upon mine ear ?" The baleful dregs 

Of these late ages, this inglorious draught 

Of servitude and folly, have not yet, 

Blest be the Eternal Ruler of the world ! 

Defiled to such a depth of sordid shame 

The native honours of the human soul ; 

Nor so effaced the image of its sire. 1 

We feel, in such a case, that man is formed for some- 
thing more than pleasure ; that the afflictions of this world 
are sources of all that is noble in us ; and that, what it is 
for the dignity of man to feel, it could not be unworthy of 
God to bestow, 



LECTURE XX1IL 

OF THE GOODNESS OP THE DEITY — OBJECTIONS OBVIATED ; DUTIES 
TO THE DEITY. 

My last Lecture was employed in considering the objec- 
tion commonly urged against the goodness of God, from 
the existence of suffering in the universe. 

If to suffer were indeed all, and no advantage flowed 
from it to the individual himself, or to those around him, 
then might its existence be a proof that he who willed it as 
a part of the great system of things, without relation to 
other parts of the system, was, at least to the extent of Ihe 
suffering which it was possible for him not to produce, 
defective in benevolence. It is a conclusion which we 

3 Pleasures of Imagination, book ih 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



413 



might be unwilling to admit, indeed, because our hearts are 
too strongly impressed with that divine goodness which we 
feel in the constitution of our own internal frame, as much 
as in that magnificent display of it which is every where 
around us, not to shrink from such a belief, if expressed in 
words, as impiety and ingratitude. But, if to suffer be all, 
the belief, from the expression of which we should still per- 
haps shrink with a feeling of reluctant assent, must not the 
less be, in our heart, irresistible. 

The question which is of so much importance for us then 
is, whether to suffer be the whole of suffering ? or, whether 
there do not flow from it consequences which so far over- 
balance the temporary evil, as to alter its very nature ? 
since, in that case, the existence of what is essential to so 
much good, far from being inconsistent with divine benevo- 
lence, would be a proof of that very benevolence. If, in 
such circumstances of greater resulting advantage, man had 
not been formed capable of suffering, God would then have 
been less good. 

This question it was the object of my last Lecture to 
consider ; and if the observations which I then made were 
satisfactory, they must have shown that, if virtue be excel- 
lent, the capacity of suffering by which virtue is formed or 
perfected, must, when this great relation of it is considered, 
be allowed to have itself an excellence that is relative to 
the excellence produced by it. Without it, we might, 
indeed, have been what the world, in its common language, 
terms happy, the passive subjects of a series of agreeable 
sensations : but we could not have had the delights of con- 
science ; we could not have felt what it is to be magnani- 
mous, to have the toil and the combat and the victory, to 
exult that we have something within us which is superior 
not to danger only, but which can vanquish even pleasure 
itself; to feel that we are not merely happier than we 
were, but nobler than we were, worthy of being admitted 
to other exercises of virtue, in which we are conscious of a 



414 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



power that may hope to prevail in them, and worthy almost 
of the approving glance of that God who sees every secret 
conflict, and who is its judge and rewarder, as well as its 
witness. 

When I say, that without virtue we might be, perhaps, 
what the world terms happy, I do injustice even to the 
sordid sentiments of those, whom, in opposition to the better 
part of mankind, we commonly designate by the name of 
the world. The very lowest of the mob may wish, indeed, 
for the grandeur which he sees in the palace, and the equi- 
page of the indolent voluptuary. But his highest admira- 
tion is not for him. It is, if his country was ever oppressed, 
for some hero, whose adventures in struggling to resist that 
oppression, have become traditionary in the very tales and 
ballads of the cottage, — who, in the whole course of his 
struggle, had difficulty after difficulty to encounter, and 
whose life of peril at last, perhaps, was terminated with the 
triumph of conscience, indeed, but in all the bodily torture 
which a tyrant could inflict. If a religious persecution 
have ever raged in his land, his admiration is in like man- 
ner kept for those whom he feels a sort of pride in consider- 
ing as martyrs of his faith, who are known to him, not as 
rich or powerful, but as sufferers, poor, perhaps, like himself, 
and distinguished only by that heroic suffering which 
endears them to his reverence. There is not a peasant of 
the rudest order, who would think for a moment of com- 
paring to such men the indolent and careless possessor of 
half the land which he has ever seen. If the choice were 
given to him of either situation, and if he were to prefer, 
as, under the influence of sensual desire, he might prefer, 
the passive ease and luxury of the one to the active virtue 
of the other, his own heart would say to him that he had 
made an unworthy choice ; it would tell him that he had 
preferred the less to the more noble ; he would have remorse 
even in entering on the possession of what he before re- 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



415 



garded as happiness, and the martyr or the hero would 
haunt his memory like the remembrance of a crime. 

Even the world, then, in their estimation of excellence, 
look to something more than a succession of passive sensa- 
tions ; and it is surely a singular misconception of benevo- 
lence, which would require of God that he should make 
man no nobler than that species of being, which even 
common minds feel to be less noble than the being which 
man is capable of becoming, in the present system of 
things; — that it should be an imperfection in the divine 
goodness to have rendered us susceptible of heroic virtue, — 
that is to say, to have placed us in circumstances without 
which there can be no heroic virtue, — and that it was 
incumbent on him, from the very excellence of his own 
nature, to have made us such, as the best and noblest of us 
would blush to be. 

Count all the advantage prosperous Vice attains, 
'Tis but what Virtue flies from — or disdains. 1 

There is an ambiguity in the term happiness, like that 
which, on a former occasion, it seemed to me of so much 
importance to point out to you, in the analogous word 
desire, as giving rise to much of the sophistry on this and 
on other kindred questions, in which it furnished the 
declaimer against pure disinterested virtue with the appear- 
ance of a deceitful triumph, when a clearer analysis of a 
single word, explanatory of its double meaning, might 
have shown the fallacy on which the triumph was founded. 
Happiness is sometimes used as synonymous with all that 
is desirable ; in which case, to a good mind, that can per- 
ceive all the relations of suffering, and feel the important 
moral advantages which result from it, it may be said to 
include, in certain circumstances, in which pleasure could 



1 Essay on Man, Ep. iv. 89-90. 



416 OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 

not be enjoyed without a sacrifice of virtue, even suffering 
itself. At other times it is used to signify only what is 
immediately pleasurable, and therefore in this sense ex- 
cludes suffering. What is pleasurable, and what is desir- 
able, are not to be accounted words of exactly the same 
import, if we attend to all the variety of our desires. I 
have shown, in some of my former Lectures, that in many 
cases, indeed in the greater number of cases, if we analyze 
with sufficient minuteness the whole mental process, so as 
to discover what it is which is directly present to the mind 
at the very moment of the desire, it is not pleasure which 
we thus directly desire, but some other immediate object, 
which pleasure may indeed accompany, but to which 
pleasure is only an accompaniment. That the immediate 
object of our desire, for example, in rushing to the relief of 
one who is in clanger, is not the pleasure of giving relief, 
but the relief itself, the subsequent contemplation of which 
is, indeed, by a bountiful provision of Heaven, associated 
with delight — as the failure in the attempt to afford it is 
accompanied with pain — but which we desire instantly, 
without regard to our own personal delight that would 
follow it, or the pain that would be felt by us if the relief 
were not given. The same constitution of our nature which 
has made pleasure directly desirable, has made many other 
objects of our thought directly desirable, and among the 
rest virtue ; not for the single reason that virtue is pleasant, 
any more than we desire pleasure as pleasure, merely 
because it may be consistent with virtue, but because it 
is the very nature of virtue, and the very nature of 
pleasure, as contemplated by us, to be desirable, whether 
separate or combined. These different objects, which in 
many cases coincide as desirable, in many cases may be 
balanced against each other ; and we may, when both are 
incompatible, according as one or the other is to certain 
minds, or in certain circumstances, an object of greater or 
less desire, sacrifice a mere pleasure for a virtue, — a virtue 



OP THE GOODNESS OP THE DEITY. 



417 



for a mere pleasure. We may not always, then, in the 
competition of two objects, desire what is immediately the 
more pleasing, in the strict sense of that term ; for pleasure, 
as mere pleasure, we have seen, is far from being the sole 
direct object of desire ; but it is very evident that what- 
ever be the direct object of desire, we must always desire 
that which has seemed to us the more desirable, since this 
is only another mode of expressing the very fact of the 
superior desire itself; and the double sense of the term 
desirable, in expressing this prevailing influence, and con- 
sequently of happiness, which is regarded as synonymous 
with the gratification of our desires, has led to the supposi- 
tion that pleasure, which is thus often used as synonymous 
with that which is desirable, is truly the uniform object of 
our desire. It seems, therefore, in this sense, when desir- 
ableness is falsely limited to mere pleasure, that to exclude 
suffering is necessary to our happiness, and therefore to the 
goodness of that Being who wills our happiness. But if 
happiness be understood more generally as the attainment 
of that which, in all the circumstances in which we may be 
placed, is regarded by us as most desirable ; then suffering 
itself is in many situations essential to it, when to suffer is 
to be more virtuous ; and not to have produced the 
capacity of that virtuous suffering, which in many cases 
we prefer to pleasure, would in those cases have contributed 
less to our happiness, in this best sense, and consequently 
been less benevolent, than not to have produced the plea- 
sure, which even we regard as inferior to the suffering. 

Ipsa quidem virtus pretium sibi; solaque late 
Fortunae secura nitet, nec fascibus ullis 
Erigitur plausuque petit clarescere vulgi, 
Nil opis externae cupiens, nil indiga laudis 3 
Divitiis animosa suis. 

It is for its own sake, indeed, as indicative of the moral 
excellence of oui nature, that virtue truly is to us of richest 
value. Even though all preference of it, however, were a 

T 2 



418 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



mere balancing of pleasures, without any regard to its own 
intrinsic excellence as an object of noblest desire, the 
capacity of suffering, as essential to the highest pleasures of 
conscience, might be truly a gift of divine bounty. At 
present, with all the distraction of earthly things, and 
earthly passions, there is perhaps no pleasure so delightful 
as the remembrance of our own heroic conduct, in any 
occasion that admitted of heroism ; and in a state of purer 
being, the remembrance of that heroism may be still more 
elevating and delightful. If, with all the notions which it 
involves, of our virtue and the approving regard of God, it 
constitute the highest pleasure of which a created being is 
capable, it is no impeachment of any divine perfection, to 
suppose that the Deity, though with the power of making 
his creatures happy in various ways, could not give to a 
finite and dependent being any happiness greater than that 
which is by its very nature the greatest which the consti- 
tution of a finite and dependent being admits, any more 
than even he could make a circle triangular, or form a line 
larger than an infinite one. The joys of conscience, as they 
extend through our immortal existence, might thus, even in 
a barter of pleasures and pains, be very cheaply purchased 
by the short sufTerings of earth : and God, therefore, be 
benevolent, in placing us in circumstances which enable us 
to make the purchase. 

This might be the case, even though the most heroic 
generosity were to be valued only as an instrument of 
pleasure, and though we were to omit in our estimate of 
virtue all for which it is most precious in the eyes of the 
virtuous. 44 Prospera in plebeni ac vilia ingenia deveniunt ; 
at calamitates terroresque mortalium sub jugum mittere, 
proprium magni viri est. Magnus es vir : sed unde scio, 
,si tibi fortuna non dat facultatem exkibendae virtutis I 
Descendisti ad Olympia ; si nemo praeter te. coronam habes, 
victoriam non habes." Think not, I beseech you, says the 
.same eloquent writer, that the calamities with which tLe 



OF THE GOODNESS OP THE DEITY. 419 



gods may have favoured us, as occasions of virtue, are to 
be dreaded as terrible. They rather are to be esteemed 
wretched, who lie torpid in luxurious ease, whom a sluggish 
calm detains on the great voyage, like vessels that lie 
weltering on a sea without a gale. The bravest of the 
army are they whom the commander selects for the most 
perilous service. They do not repine against their general 
when they quit the camp. They say only, with a con- 
sciousness of their own strength of heart, He has known 
well how to choose. Such, too, be our feelings when we 
are required to suffer what is terrible only to the coward 
that shrinks from it. Let us exult in the thought that 
Heaven has counted us worthy of showing what the noble 
nature of man can overcome. " Nolite, obsecro vos, 
expavescere ista, quae dii immortales, velut stimulos, 
admovent animis. Calamitas virtutis occasio est. Illos 
merito quis dixerit miseros, quos, velut in mari lento, 
tranquillitas iners detinet. Deus quos probat, quos amat, 
indurat, recognoscit, exercet. Quare, in castris quoque, 
periculosa fortissimis imperantur. Dux lectissimos mittit, 
qui nocturnis hostes aggrediantur insidiis, aut explorent 
iter, aut praesidium loco dejiciant. Nemo eorum qui 
exeunt dicit, Male de me Imperator meruit; sed, Bene 
judicavit. Idem dicant, quicunque jubentur pati timidis 
ignavisque flebilia: Digni visi sumus Deo, in quibus ex- 
periretur, quantum humana natura possit pati." 1 

When we see, then, what the world calls the suffering? 
of the virtuous, let us not think of the sufferings only, — for 
this would be as absurd as to count all the fatigues of the 
husbandman without thinking of the harvest. Let us 
think of the suffering only, as it is regarded by the sufferer 
himself ; as that which proves to him what he is, — which 
gives him the opportunity of knowing that he is so consti- 
tuted as to be capable, not of pleasure merely, but of that 

1 Seneca de Proyidentia, cap. iv. 



420 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY . 



which is far dearer to him than pleasure itself, and of 
which he would not resign the noble consciousness for all 
the sluggish delights of all the luxurious. Let us think of 
him as the inhabitant of another world, to which his virtues, 
those virtues which he is now maturing, are all that can 
attend him from this earth, — when the luxuries of earth 
must long have perished, or be remembered only from their 
relation to those moral feelings which are the only feelings 
that are immortal. 

" The opulence of a wicked man," says an ingenious 
French writer, " the high posts to which he is elevated, 
the homage which is paid to him, excite your chagrin. 
What ! say you, is it for such men that wealth and 
dignities are reserved ? Cease your unjust murmurs! If 
what you regret as good were substantially good, the 
wicked would not enjoy it ; you would be the possessor. 
What would you say of a great man, a Turerme, or a 
O'onde, who, after having saved his country, should 
complain that his services had been ill requited, because, 
in his presence, some sugar-plumbs had been distributed 
to children of which he had not got his share ? Your 
complaint is not better founded. Has God, then, nothing 
with which to recompense you but a few pieces of coin, 
and honours that are as perishable as they are frivolous !" 

Weak, foolish man ! will Heaven reward us there 
With the same trash mad mortals wish for here 1 
Go, like the Indian, in another life 
Expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife ; 
As well as dream such trifles are assigu'd 
As toys and empires for a godlike mind I 1 

" O God !" exclaims the Persian poet Sadi, " have pity 
on the wicked ! for thou hast done every thing for the good, 
in having made them good." 

In giving to the good that nature by which they are 



1 Essay on Man, Ep. iv. lines 173-180, 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



421 



capable of virtuous progress, God Las indeed done e very- 
thing for the good, — far more, unquestionably, than if he 
had placed them in a world such as those who at present 
object to his benevolence, would have counted perhaps 
worthy of his creation, — a world of such indolence and 
passive pleasure as the most worthless, perhaps, are capable 
of enjoying here, — a world from which, if the option were 
given, a noble spirit would gladly hasten into that better 
world of difficulty, and virtue, and conscience, which is the 
scene of our present exertion. It is good to have given us 
pleasure, but it is better to have given us that which even 
ourselves feel to be nobler than pleasure. 

I have dwelt the longer on this point, because it seemed 
to me the most important on which I could have dwelt. 
Our relation to God, to our Creator, Preserver, Re warder, 
is surely the relation which deserves most to be considered 
by us ; and I am anxious that your minds should not, with 
respect to that great Being, acquire habits of unworthy 
suspicion, which, as I endeavoured to illustrate yesterday, 
by an allusion to the slighter relationships of earthly 
intimacy, we should blush to feel in the case of man. If, 
when any kindness was conferred on us by a friend, we 
were to sit down and deliberately consider whether he was 
kind in conferring it on us, whether it was not possible for 
him to have done for us a little more, and whether we 
ought not, therefore, to complain of him as selfishly 
penurious, rather than to feel gratitude to him as 
beneficent ; if we were to do this in the case of an 
earthly friend, should we look upon ourselves with the 
same approbation ? And is God, indeed, less worthy of 
our confidence than the creature whom he has made ? 

It is when we rely fully on his goodness that we truly 
enjoy that goodness ; it is then that adversity disappears as 
adversity, that there is no evil which we may not convert 
into a source of advantage, — because what is most afflicting 
is only the lesson, or the trial, or the consummation of our 



422 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



virtue, — that all nature is embellished to us by the divine 
presence, as the scene of actions which it is noble to 
perform, or of sufferings which, when borne with the feel- 
ings with which the virtuous bear them, it would scarcely 
be too strong an expression to term delightful. 

God, then, who has poured on us so much enjoyment, of 
which it is virtuous to partake, in the whole system of 
nature, and in the frame of our mind, is manifestly bene- 
volent in calling to us to enjoy ; and though less manifestly, 
he is not less truly benevolent in the evils which he has 
given to our virtue to bear, — the common wants, by the 
influence of which the whole multitudes of our race are 
formed into a society active in the reciprocation of mutual 
services, and the greater occasional sufferings, or voluntary 
perils, which excite the compassion or the veneration of 
others, and cherish, in the heroic sufferer himself, a spirit 
of gentle or sublime virtue, without the consciousness of 
which, the moral scene would scarcely be an object of 
delightful interest, even to human regard. 

If the system of things has thus been framed by a God 
of benevolence, it is under the moral government of a 
benevolent God that the world subsists, under the govern- 
ment of a God, who has shown too clearly, by the universal 
feelings which he has given to all his moral creatures, his 
love of virtue, and his disapprobation of vice, to leave any 
doubt as to the nature of his own high estimate of human 
actions. If it be impossible for ourselves not to feel the 
approvableness of certain actions, and the delinquency that 
is implied in certain other actions, it is impossible for us not 
to extend these feelings to other minds, which we suppose 
to consider with the same freedom from passion, and the 
same accurate knowledge of every circumstance, the same 
actions that are approved or condemned by ourselves. To 
believe that pure generosity and pure malice which every 
human being loves in the one case and hates in the other 
case, as soon as he contemplates them, as if pointed out to 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



423 



his love and hatred by the author and enlightener of the 
heart, are, to that very author and enlightener of the heart, 
the same in every respect, except as he has chosen to 
distinguish them in our judgment, would be as difficult for 
us, or almost a3 difficult, as to believe that a circle and a 
triangle have different properties, only as conceived by us, 
and appear to involve exactly the same proportions and 
relations to that perfect intelligence, whom some of the 
Greek philosophers have distinguished by the title of the 
Supreme Geometer. 

What we regard with moral approbation or disapproba- 
tion, we are led then by our very nature to regard as 
objects of approbation or disapprobation, not to all mankind 
only, but to every being whom we imagine to contemplate 
the actions, and especially to him, who, as quickest to 
perceive and to know, must, as we think, by this very 
superiority of discernment, be quickest also to approve and 
condemn. 

It is of this moral approbation or disapprobation in the 
divine nature, that we speak, when we speak of what is 
commonly termed the justice of God. The merit or demerit, 
which it is impossible for us not to feel, we consider as felt 
by him who has thus distinguished them to our heart, and 
who has the power of making happy what he approves, 
and of verifying to the wicked the anticipations of their 
own remorse. The divine justice, as it is an object of 
conception to human beings, is nothing more than the 
ampler development of these human feelings, feelings that 
are human indeed, in our transient love or hatred, but the 
reference of which to the Deity depends on a principle of 
our nature, as universal as that which leads us to the very 
conception of the Deity as a Power existing now and 
existing before the world was made. It is by the analogy 
of human design, that we infer in the universe the opera- 
tion of a mightier designer; by the analogy of human 
sentiment, we infer, in like manner, in the Creator and 



424 



OF THE GOODNESS OF THE DEITY. 



Ruler of the universe, those moral feelings by which he is 
not the creator and ruler only of mankind, but their 
judge, — a judge whose approbation is already felt in the 
conscience of the good, as his disapprobation is already not 
less felt in the gloomy and trembling conscience of the 
guilty. 

Such are the views of the nature of the Divine Being to 
which we are led, from those traces of his character which 
the universe, as formed by him, and especially our own 
spiritual frame, which is to us the most important part of 
the universe, exhibit. The most interesting of all inquiries 
terminates in the most pleasing of all results. Whatever 
power it might have been that created us, benevolent or 
cruel, to that power we must have been subject, without 
any means of shelter, because there was no superior 
sovereign of nature, who might protect and avenge us. 
We might have been, in misery, what our imagination, 
after bringing together all the forms of torture which the 
oppressions of this earth can afford, would be too poor of 
images to represent. Instead of a tyrant, however, in the 
heavens, we discover a power from which we have no need 
to fly for succour ; since, whatever might be the kindness 
to which we might wish to fly, it would be a kindness less 
than that from which we fled, — a kindness far less than 
that which created for us this glorious abode, and which 
gave us the means of rising, with the consciousness of 
virtue, from all that is excellent on earth, to sublimer and 
happier excellence, in progressive stages of immortality. 

In this view of the wisdom, and power, and benevolence 
of the Supreme Being is involved, what is commonly 
termed our duty to God. In one sense of the word, indeed, 
all our duties are duties which we owe to him, who has 
endowed us with every gift which we possess, and who has 
commanded these duties, by that voice of conscience which 
speaks in every breast. But the duties to which I now 
allude, are those which have their divine object more 



OF OUR DUTIES TO THE DEITY. 425 



immediately in view, and which consider him in those 
gracious characters in which his works reveal him to us. 
It is our duty to love the benevolence to which we owe so 
much, to feel pleasure in tracing every display of that 
benevolence in the happiness of every thing that lives, and, 
in all that we value most in ourselves, to rejoice in feeling 
its relation to the goodness from which it was derived, and 
in expressing our dependence, not as if the expression of it 
were a task enjoined, but with the readiness of love, that 
overflows in acknowledgments of kindness received, only 
because it overflows with gratitude for the kindness. If a 
mere earthly friend, whose affection we have delighted to 
share, is separated from us, for any length of time, by the 
ocean, or a few kingdoms that lie between^ how delightful 
to us is every memorial of his former presence. Our 
favourite walks and favourite seats continue still to be 
favourite walks and favourite seats, or rather they acquire 
new beauty, in the thought that they were beautiful to 
other eyes that now are absent. There is no conversation 
so pleasing to us, as that of which his virtues are the 
subject ; and even the rudest sketch of his drawing, or the 
verses which he may have left unfinished, are regarded by 
us with far more delightful admiration, than paintings and 
poems, which surpass them in every charm, but that which 
friendship alone could give. We not merely feel all this 
affection for oiir friend, but we feel too, that it would be a 
sort of crime against friendship, to regard with indifference 
any thing which related to him ; and if this be a crime 
with respect to earthly friendship, it is surely not less a 
crime, when its object is the friendship that has been the 
source of all the happiness which we have felt. To be 
surrounded with the divine goodness, and yet to feel no joy 
in contemplating the magnificent exhibition of it; to 
admire any works rather than those of Godj and, far from 
delighting to speak or think of his moral perfections, to 
give our thoughts and our conversation in preference to the 



426 



OF OUR DUTIES TO THE DEITY. 



virtues, or still more gladly, to the vices of those of whom 
the name is perhaps almost all that is known to us ; this is 
to fail, with respect to the noblest of beings, in a duty 
which, if that noblest of beings could divest himself of his 
perfections, and become, with far less kindness to us, a 
creature like ourselves, we then should blush to violate to 
our mortal benefactor. 

Our first duty, then, to the Deity, is to dwell with 
delight on the contemplation of his perfections, to cultivate 
our devout feelings as the happiest and noblest feelings of 
which our nature is capable, and to offer that worship of 
the heart, which is the only offering that can be made by 
man to his Creator. "Primus est deorum cultus deos 
credere ; deinde reddere illis majestatem suam, reddere 
bonitatem, sine qua nulla majestas est : scire, illos esse qui 
praesident mundo, qui universa vi sua temperant, qui 
humani generis tutelam gerunt, interdum curiosi singulorum. 
Hi nec dant malum nec habent ; ceterum castigant quosdam, 
et coercent; et irrogant poenas, et aliquando specie boni 
puniunt. Vis deos propitiare ? bonus esto. Satis illos 
coluit quisquis imitatus est." 1 Would you propitiate the 
Gods ? Be good. Whoever has imitated them, has already 
offered to them the most acceptable worship. 

Next in order to the duties of veneration and devout 
acknowledgment of the divine goodness, is the duty of 
that unrepining submission to his will, without which there 
can be no real belief of the providential goodness, which 
the lips, indeed, may have professed to believe, but the lips 
only. If it would be our duty to give ready obedience to 
the arrangements which an earthly sovereign makes, for 
the security and general happiness of his little state, in some 
season of peril, though it involve the sacrifice of many of 
.our personal comforts ; to quit, perhaps, our peaceful homes, 
and expose, ourselves, in the band of our fellow-citizens, to 



1 Seneca, Epist. xcv. 



OF OUR DUTIES TO THE DEITY. 



427 



the inconveniences and dangers of a protracted warfare, 
that is foreign to all our tranquil habits ; or to send to the 
same perilous warfare, those whose life of rising virtues is 
the only earthly thing to which we have been accustomed 
to look for the happiness of our own declining years ; if we 
should feel it guilt and disgrace to withhold the offering, 
when the happiness of a single state is the object, and 
when he who requires the sacrifice is but a fallible being 
like ourselves, how much greater guilt and moral disgrace 
must it be to hesitate in making those sacrifices, or to 
repine when they are made, which are demanded by 
wisdom that is owned by us to be incapable of error, for 
purposes which, as our own hearts have declared, must be 
purposes beneficial to mankind. Shall the warrior rejoice 
in dying in battle for his country, or even for his prince ! 
and shall we feel no joy in finishing a life that has been 
accordant with the divine will, in whatever manner the 
same divine will may require it of us? or, if the easy 
offering of life be not that which is required, in bearing a 
little longer for the whole community of mankind, any of 
those evils which we should never shrink from bearing, for 
that small portion of the community which our country 
comprehends ? " Shall others say, beloved city of 
Cecrops!" exclaims Marcu3 Aurelius, "and shall I not 
rather say, beloved city of our God!" 

These views of the Divinity, the habitual love of his 
perfections, and ready acquiescence in the dispensations of 
his universal providence, are not more suitable to the 
divine nature, than productive of delight and consolation to 
him who entertains them. They distinguish, indeed, the 
virtuous from the rest of mankind, in serenity of happiness, 
as much as in the purity of heart from which that delight- 
ful serenity is derived. 

He sees with other eyes than theirs. Where they 

Behold a sun, he views a Deity : 

What makes them only smile, makes him adore. 



428 



OF OUR DUTIES TO THE DEITY* 



Titles and honours, if they prove his fate, 

He lays aside, to find his dignity : 

Himself too much he prizes to be proud; 

And nothing thinks so great in man, as man. 

Too dear he holds his interest, to neglect 

Another's welfare, or his right invade : 

Their interest, like a lion, lives on prey. 

They kindle at the shadow of a wrong : 

Wrong he sustains with temper, looks on heaven, 

Nor stoops to think his injurer his foe. 

Nought but what wounds his virtue wounds his peace. 

His joys create, theirs murder future bliss. 

To triumph in existence his alone; 

And his alone triumphantly to think, 

His true existence is not yet begun. 1 

The true existence of man is, indeed, scarcely begun on 
earth. There is an immortality awaiting him, and all 
which is most worthy of being prized in the short period of 
his mortal life, is the relation which it may bear to those 
endless ages that are to follow it. In my next Lecture, I 
shall inquire into the grounds of our belief in this future 
state of continued existence. 



LECTURE XXIV. 

OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL* 

In my last Lecture, I finished the remarks which I had 
to offer on the relation which man, in his earthly existence, 
bears to that greatest of Beings, from whom every thing 
which exists has derived its origin. Ve found, in the 
phenomena of the universe, abundant proof of a designing 



1 Night Thoughts, Night viii* 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



Tower, that arranged them in their beautiful regularity ; 
and, in the happiness which they tend to produce, a proof 
not less strong, of the benevolence which has arranged 
them for purposes so gracious. 

When we consider the relation of man to his Creator, 
however, do we consider only a relation that terminates 
with the few years of our mortal life? When every thing- 
external fades upon our eye, does the spirit within, that 
almost gave its own life to every thing external, fade like- 
wise ? or is there not something over which the accidents 
that injure or destroy our mortal frame have no power ; 
that continues still to subsist, in the dissolution of all our 
bodily elements, and that would continue to subsist, though 
not the body only, but the earth, and the sun, and the 
whole system of external things, were to pass into new 
forms of combination, or to perish, as if they had never 
been, in the void of the universe? 

There is within us an immortal spirit. We die to those 
around us, indeed, when the bodily frame, which alone is 
the instrument of communion with them, ceases to be an 
instrument, by the absence of the mind which it obeyed. 
But, though the body moulders into earth, that spirit which 
is of purer origin returns to its purer source. What 
Lucretius says of it is true, in a sense far nobler than that 
which he intended : 

Cedit item retro, de terra quod fuit ante, 

In terrain ; aed qucd missum est ex getheris oris, 

Id rursus, cceli fulgentia templa receptant. 1 

That we do not die wholly, is a belief so consolatory to 
our self-importance, — to vhieh annihilation seems more 
than a mere privation of enjoy nent, and rather itself a 
positive evil,: — that cur hope of immortality may be sup- 
posed, like every other hope, to render us credulous of that 



1 De Rerum Natura,lib. ii. 998-1000 



430 OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 

which we are eager to believe. There is a principle, too, 
which I pointed out to you when I attempted to explain 
the peculiar vividness of our love of glory as a mere emotion, 
that may aid this credulity, — a principle by which the very 
thought of our name, as our name, at the most distant 
period, seems to us to involve the reality of the existence 
of those very feelings which are all that seem to us in our 
conception to constitute ourselves. To think of any thing 
as ours at any particular period, is, as I then explained to 
you, to feel as if we were truly existing at that particular 
period ; because it is to have combined the conception of 
the particular object, whatever it may be, with the concep- 
tion of that self which is known to us by some conscious 
feeling, and which, as conceived by us, therefore, must 
always carry with it the notion of consciousness ; and the 
frequency of this illusion, by which, in thinking of our 
name, or of other objects connected with us, we extend into 
futurity the conception of our consciousness, though it might 
not be sufficient to produce the belief of immortality, must 
be allowed at least to strengthen the belief, if once existing. 
It is necessary, therefore, in entering on an inquiry in which 
we are so deeply concerned, to divest ourselves as much as 
possible of the influence of our wishes ; and, if we cannot 
iu quire with the impartiality of absolute indifference, to 
inquire at least with the caution of those who know their 
own partial wishes, and, knowing these, know in what 
manner they are likely to be influenced. 

The change which death produces is the most striking of 
all the changes which we can witness, even though we 
should not believe it to imply the dissolution of the prin- 
ciple that felt and thought in life. It is at least to our 
senses the apparent cessation of every thought and feeling. 
There is no bloom on the cheek, no motion in the limb, no 
lustre in the eye. Even these are but the slightest changes. 
There is no voice or look of reflection, no apparent con- 
sciousness, nothing but a little quicker tendency to decay, 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



431 



to distinguish him, who, but a few moments before, was 
perhaps wise, and cheerful, and active, full of remembrances 
and hopes, from the insensible statue which has been dug 
from the quarry, and slowly fashioned into the semblance 
of his shape. With such a change before our eyes, it is 
unquestionably allowable to doubt, at least, whether any 
thing have truly survived this change ; or whether thought 
and feeling have not ceased wholly by the injury of that 
mechanism, in connexion with which alone they become 
objects of our knowledge. 

It is unquestionably allowable, as I have said, to those 
who have never made the phenomena of the mind, and the 
nature of the substance which exhibits these phenomena, 
objects of their reflection, to doubt whether all the functions 
of life may not be destroyed in that moment which destroys 
the more obvious functions, that alone come under the sur- 
vey of our senses. If the phenomena of thought be pheno- 
mena that consist only in the play of certain organs, the 
destruction of those organs must be the destruction of the 
thought itself. It would then be as absurd to speak of the 
continuance of consciousness, when there are no conscious 
organs, as to speak of the continuance of musical vibra- 
tions, without a single elastic body. 

If there be nothing, then, distinct from the material 
frame, which is manifestly subject to decay, our doubt may 
be converted into certainty, or at least may almost be con- 
verted into certainty. We may say, then, that death which 
destroys the organization, destroys the capacity of feeling, 
because it destroys that in which feeling consists. The 
elements of that which once thought, may subsist in a 
different form, and may, perhaps, even at some remote 
period, become again elements of a similar organization, and 
again constitute propositions or passions, as they before 
constituted some truth or error, or emotion of love or 
hate ; but they must meet again, by some new arrangement, 
before they can thus become feelings ; and, in the mean 



432 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



time, they may have been blown about by the winds, or 
become a part of these very winds, or formed elements of 
various bodies, solid, liquid, or gaseous, as little sentient as 
the other insensible elements with which they mingled, in 
all the play of chemical compositions and decompositions. 

This conclusion, as to the absolute mortality or chemical 
decomposition of that which feels and thinks, seems irre- 
sistible, if our reasonings and passions, and whatever forms 
our consciousness, be only certain particles variously min- 
gled, and variously adhering or changing their place, 
according to the new play of chemical affinities, as new 
elements may be added to disturb the particles of thought, 
or certain other elements subtracted from the thinking com- 
pound. But, on this supposition of particles of thought, 
the whole force of the conclusion from the change in 
decomposition of the other bodily particles, depends. If 
our material frame be not thought itself, but only that 
which has a certain relation to the spiritual principle of 
thought, so as to be subservient to its feelings and volitions, 
and to perform the beautiful functions of life, as long as the 
relation, which he who established it made to depend on a 
certain state of the corporeal organs, remains, it is as little 
reasonable to conclude from the decay or change of place 
of the particles of the organs essential to the mere state of 
relative subserviency, that the spirit, united with these 
organs, has ceased to exist, as it would be to conclude, that 
the musician to whom we have often listened with rapture, 
has ceased to exist when the strings of his instrument are 
broken or torn away. It no longer, indeed, pours on our 
ear the same delightful melodies ; but the skill which 
poured from it those melodies has not perished with the 
delightful sounds themselves, nor with the instrument that 
-was the organ of enchantment. The enchanter himself, 
without whom the instrument would have been powerless, 
exists still, to produce sounds as delightful; and in the 
intervals of melody, the creative spirit, from which the 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



438 



melody originally flowed, can delight itself with remembered 
or imagined airs, which exist only as remembered or ima- 
gined, and are themselves as it were a part of the very 
spirit which conceives them. 

It is on the nature of the principle of thought, then, as 
mere matter, or as something distinct from matter, that the 
chief force of the argument seems to me to depend. If 
matter be all, and that which thinks and feels, decay, like 
every other part of the body, though the cause of immor- 
tality may even then not be absolutely hopeless, it must be 
allowed to have many difficulties not easy to be removed. 
If matter be not all, or rather, if matter have nothing in 
common with thought, but be absolutely and wholly dis- 
tinct from the thinking principle, the decay of matter can- 
not be considered as indicative of i i^e decay of mind, 
unless some other reason can be shown for the mental 
dissolution, than the mere external decay itself ; still less 
can it be considered as indicative of such mental decay, if 
every notion which we are led to form of the mind, imply 
qualities inconsistent with the very possibility of such a 
change of decomposition as the body exhibits. 

The great inquiry then is, whether our thoughts and 
feelings be, in the strictest sense of the term, particles of 
matter : a certain number of ^articles affected in a certain 
manner in that which we term an organ, forming half a 
hope, a different number of particles forming half a fear-; 
or the quarters and halves of our hopes and fears, being 
formed not merely of different numbers of sentient par- 
ticles, but perhaps too of particles that are themselves in 
their absolute nature, or in their specific affection at the 
moment, essentially different. 

In the whole course of our inquiries into the phenomena 
of the mind, I abstained from allusion to the great contro- 
versy of the materialists and immaterialists, or at least 
made only very slight allusion to it, because the analysis 
and . arrangement of the mental phenomena, considered 

u 



434 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



simply as phenomena that succeed each other in a certain 
order, and are felt to bear to each other certain relations, 
are independent of any views which we may be led to form 
of the nature of the substance itself, which exhibits these 
various but regular phenomena of thought ; and I was 
desirous of accustoming you to fix your attention chiefly on 
those simpler and more productive investigations. But 
though the materialist and the immaterialist may unite in 
the results of their analytical inquiries into the complex 
phenomena of thought, and though they may form similar 
arrangements of those phenomena, simple or compound, 
their different opinions as to the nature of the substance 
which displays these phenomena, cannot be regarded as un- 
important, in a question which relates to the mere perma- 
nence of the substance itself ; a permanence which is to be 
admitted or rejected, very nearly, according as one or other 
of those opinions is itself to be admitted or rejected. 

Is there any principle of thought and feeling, then, dis- 
tinct from that extended, divisible mass, which we term 
the corporeal frame ? 

If our consciousness were to be trusted, as to the indi- 
visibility of the sentient principle, it would scarcely be 
necessary to make any inquiry beyond it. The savage, 
indeed, in the lowest form of savage life, who is too much 
occupied with bodily necessities, to think of himself in any 
other light than as that which requires food, and feels pain 
from the want of a necessary supply of it, or as that which 
is capable of inflicting or receiving a deadly blow, may 
never have put the question to his own mind, what he is, 
and may die without having ever believed or disbelieved in 
a state of after-existence. The philosopher, who has 
reflected enough to discover the folly of half the vulgar 
creed, which is far from being the most difficult part of 
philosophy, but who has not reflected and discriminated 
enough to discover the truth of the other half of a system, 
#hich he finds it easier to condemn as a whole, yet which 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



435 



may be true in part, though false too in part, may leave 
the existence of an immaterial spirit, to be believed by the 
believers of witchcraft and second sight ; and giving his 
whole attention to the corporeal process, of which he is 
able to trace series of changes that are wholly unknown to 
the vulgar, may think that in thus tracing series of motions 
unobserved by them, he is detecting the principle of life 
itself. But all mankind, the mob, the sage inquirer, the 
very sceptic himself, when they speak or think of them- 
selves, feel a sort of unity, in which there are no parts, the 
unity of a sentient being, which, if they think of organs at 
all, is that which sees in the eye, hears in the ear, smells in 
the nostrils, itself one in all, and not merely sentient, in 
the strict meaning of that term, but the subject of various 
other feelings of different classes, remembrances, compari- 
sons, hopes, fears, love, indignation. The verbal proposition 
may never have been formed in the mind — It is one being 
which has been the subject of all the feelings of life — and 
merely because the proposition never may have been framed 
in words, or clearly developed, the multitude may be 
regarded as not having felt the truth itself. Yet, if we 
were to ask of any one, however little accustomed to philo- 
sophic inquiries, whether he was the same thinking being 
at the end of the year as at the beginning of it, he would 
smile at our question ; and would not smile less if we were 
to speak to him of the difference of three -fourths of a joy 
and half a joy, or of the many co-existing happinesses in 
the many co-existing atoms that form the happy organ ; 
the simplicity and sameness of the thinking principle, of 
that principle of which we speak as essentially one, when- 
ever we use the word I, having been felt by him tacitly, 
without the application of those technical terms, the 
employment of which might, perhaps, render obscure to 
him what had no obscurity till it was darkened with 
language. 



436 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOU Li 



What am I, whence produced, and for what end ? 
Whence drew I being, to what period tend ! 
Am I the abandon'd orphan of blind chance, 
Dropp'd by wild atoms in disorder'd dance ? 
Or from an endless chain of causes wrought, 
And of unthinking substance, born with thought : 
Am I but what I seem, mere flesh and blood, 
A branching channel with a mazy flood ? 
The purple stream that through my vessels glides, 
Dull and unconscious flows, like common tides, 
The pipes, through which the circling juices stray 
Are not that thinking I, no more than they : 
This frame, compacted with transcendent skill, 
Of moving joints, obedient to my will : 
Nursed from the fruitful glebe, like yonder tree, 
Waxes and wastes — I call it mine, not me. 
New matter still the mould'ring mass sustains ; 
The mansion changed, the tenant still remains ; 
And from the fleeting stream repaird by food, 
Distinct, as is the swimmer from the flood. 1 

Such would be our belief if we were to attend to our 
consciousness alone, It would tell us, that what we term 
I, is not many, but one ; that it is the same being which 
hears and sees, compares and remembers, and that the very 
notion of plurality and division is as inconsistent with the 
notion of self, as the notions of existence and non-existence. 
This our mere consciousness would tell us. But does not 
reason, in tins case, aid rather than lessen the force of this 
unreflecting belief ? 

If any lover of paradoxes were to assert, that fragrance 
is a sound, music a brilliant colour, hope or resentment a 
sensation of touch, he surely could not expect a very ready 
assent from those w 7 hom he addressed ; and yet, void of 
proof as all these propositions would be, and opposite to 
bur experience, and therefore relatively absurd, they would 
imply no absolute absurdity. The same great Being who 



1 Arbuthnot. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



437 



has made the sensations of fragrance, and colour, and 
melody, to result from affections of certain organs, might 
have made them to arise from causes reciprocally different. 
The affection of the organ of smell might, under a different 
arrangement, have been followed by the sensation which 
we now ascribe to sound ; the affection of the ear, by the 
sensation which we now ascribe to fragrance ; and the 
propositions that are now absurd, relatively to our present 
arrangement, would then have been relatively true. The 
assertor of materialism, however, is the assertor of a 
doctrine not relatively absurd only, but, as it appears to 
me, absolutely absurd ; a doctrine which does not state 
agreements of qualities, of which there is no proof, but 
agreements of qualities which are absolutely incompatible. 
In affirming the principle of thought to be material, he 
makes an affirmation very nearly the same in kind, or at 
least as contradictory, as if he were to pronounce of a 
whole, that it is essentially different from its constituent 
parts, or of one, that it is seven hundred and fifty. 

So much of the fallacy of the arguments of the mate- 
rialist, in endeavouring to reconcile with his system the 
simplicity of thought, arises from the false supposition of 
unity, which he ascribes to the thinking organ, as if it were 
one substance, because he has given one name to a 
multitude of substances, that it will be necessary to call 
your attention to that department of physical science which 
relates to objects as co-existing in space. 

What we are accustomed to term a body as if it were one, 
is not one in nature, but one only in relation to our inability 
of distinguishing the space, or, if there be in any case actual 
contact, the lines of contact, which separate the corpuscles, 
that are, on account of this inability of perception, which 
is relative to our weak organs, included by us in a single 
term, with an imaginary unity which ourselves alone have 
made ; and that what we term the properties of the mass, 



438 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



are the properties not of one substance, but of these co- 
existing atoms, which are in themselves, and must always 
be, substances separate and independent. 

What the materialist may be pleased to term the organ 
of thought, whether it be the whole brain and nerves, or 
only a part of the brain, or any other part of the corporeal 
frame which he may choose to consider as intelligent, is not 
one, then, but a multitude of particles, which exist near to 
each other, indeed, but which are as little one, as if they 
existed in the different planets of our system, or in the 
planets or suns of different systems. The unity which we 
give to the organ, by considering its separate atoms in a 
single glance, is a unity which it does not possess ; and we 
must not deceive ourselves, therefore, by imagining that 
we have discovered a unity which may correspond with 
the simplicity of our feelings, because we have discovered 
a number of independent corpuscles, to the multitude of 
which we have chosen to give a single name. An organ is 
not one substance, but many substances. If joy or sorrow 
be an affection of this organ, it is an affection of the various 
substances which, though distinct in their own existence, 
we comprehend under this single term. If the affection, 
therefore, be common to the whole system of particles, it 
is not one joy or sorrow, but a number of joys and sorrows, 
corresponding with the number of separate particles thus 
affected ; which, if matter be infinitely divisible, may be 
divided into an infinite number of little joys and sorrows, that 
have no other relation to each other in their state of in- 
finitesimal division than the relations of proximity, by 
which they may be grouped together in spheres or cubes, 
or other solids, regular or irregular, of pleasures or pains ; 
but by which it is impossible for them to become one 
pleasure or pain, more than any particle of insentient 
matter can become any other particle of insentient matter, 
or any mass of such matter become any other mass. We 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



439 



can conceive the particles of the moon to be mingled with 
the particles of our earth, and to cohere with them in actual 
contact ; but the number of particles that form the moon, 
cannot become the very particles that now form the earth, 
however intimately mingled. Each particle has still its 
own independent affections, and these affections of a myriad 
of particles are still only the affections of a myriad of 
particles. It is vain to say, then, in the hope of obviating 
this irresistible objection, from the felt unity of the being 
which we term self, that our thoughts and feelings are not 
qualities of the particles as they exist simply, but of the 
whole congeries of particles as existing in one beautiful 
piece of living mechanism ; for this is only to repeat the 
very difficulty itself, and to assign the insuperable difficulty 
as a deliverance from the insuperable difficulty. The whole 
of which materialists speak, whether they term it a con- 
geries, an organ, or a system of organs, is truly nothing 
in itself. It is, as I have said, a mere word invented by 
ourselves, a name which we give to a plurality of co-exist- 
ing objects, not a new object to be distinguished from the 
heap. A thousand atoms, near to each other or remote, 
are only a thousand atoms, near or remote ; and are 
precisely the same atoms, with precisely the same qualities, 
whether we consider them singly, or divide them, in our 
conception, by tens, fifties, hundreds, or give to the whole 
one comprehensive name, as if a thousand were but a greater 
unit. There is no principle of unity in them : it is the 
mind considering them, that gives to them all the unity 
which they have, or can have. 

In considering the result of a combination of parts, we 
are too apt to confound the multitude of separate effects 
with that single great result to which we give a particular 
name. Thus, melody is the result of a few impulses, which 
a bow gives to the strings of a violin ; and we consider this 
melody as one effect, when in truth it is one only as a 



440 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



feeling of our mind, that is simple and indivisible, not as a 
state of compound and divisible matter. All that is not 
mental, is a multitude of effects, a multitude of particles of 
the sounding body, of the interposed air, of the vibratory 
organ, alternately approaching and receding. A multitude 
of those was necessary, indeed, to produce in the mind, by 
their concurring influence, the musical delight. But each 
corpuscular effect may be distinguished, in our conception 
at least, from every other effect that co-exists with it. In 
the instrument, the air, the organ, the particles are all 
separate and independent. The material phenomenon is 
truly, therefore, as long as it is wholly material, a multi- 
tude of phenomena; the concurrence of a multitude of 
states of a multitude of particles of the musical instrument ; 
the elastic medium ; the organ of sense ; the brain, without 
any unity whatever. The properties of the co-existing 
atoms, in this great whole, are the properties of the parts ; 
and if the qualities, states, or affections of the parts were 
laid out of estimation, nothing would remain to be estimated 
as a quality, state, or affection of the whole. 

The distinction which I have now made, is one with 
which it seems to me peculiarly important that your minds 
should be fully impressed ; because it is to indistinct 
analogies of this sort, that the materialist, when he has no 
other retreat, is accustomed to fly for shelter. The very 
analogy of melody to which I have now alluded, is a 
favourite example. It is one effect, though resulting from 
the state of a number of particles ; and if music flow from 
a material organ, it is said, why may not thought '? If, 
indeed, what alone is properly termed music, the sensations 
or series of sensations that follow certain affections of the 
sensorial organ, that which is felt at every moment as one 
and indivisible, were itself one organic result, a state of the 
divisible organ and not of a substance that is by nature 
indivisible, then indeed every thought might likewise be 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 441 

material. But in asserting this, the materialist begs the 
very point in question, assuming without proof what he yet 
professes to attempt to prove. It is evident, as we have 
seen, that what alone is one in all that multitude of effects 
from which melody results, the musical delight itself, is not 
the state of the musical instrument, nor of the vibrating 
air, and as little is it proved to be a state of any number of 
particles of the brain. It is one result, indeed, but it is 
one only, because it is an affection of that which is in its 
own nature simple ; and till we arrive at the sentient 
principle itself, there is no unity whatever, but a multitude 
of states of a multitude of vibrating particles. When the 
materialist, then, adduces this or any other example of 
resulting unity, as illustrative of organic thought, all which 
you will find to be necessary is simply to consider what it 
is which is truly one, in the result that is adduced as one, 
and you will find in every instance that the point in dispute 
has been taken for granted in the example adduced to prove 
it, — that there is no real unity in all the material part of 
the process, and that the unity asserted is truly a mental 
unity, the unity of a mental feeling, or the unity of a mere 
name for expressing briefly the many co-existing states of 
many separate and independent particles which we have 
chosen to denominate a single mass. 

In the Letter of the Society of Freethinkers to Martinus 
Scriblerus, the argument of those who consider thought as a 
quality of many particles is stated ludicrously indeed, but 
with as much real force as in the reasoning of which it is a 
parody. 

" To the learned Inquisitor into Nature, Martinus 
Scriblerus, the Society of Freethinkers, greeting : 

" Grecian Coffee-House, May 7. 
" It is with unspeakable joy we have heard of your 
inquisitive genius, and we think it great pity that it should 

u2 



442 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



not be better employed, than in looking after that theolo- 
gical nonentity, commonly called the Soul ; since, after all 
your inquiries, it will appear you have lost your labour in 
seeking the residence of such a chimera, that never had 
being but in the brains of some dreaming philosophers. Is 
it not Demonstration to a person of your sense, that, since 
you cannot find it, there is no such thing? In order to set 
so hopeful a genius right in this matter, we have sent you 
an answer to the ill-grounded sophisms of those crack- 
brained fellows, and likewise an easy mechanical explication 
of Perception or Thinking. 

" One of their chief arguments is, that Self-consciousness 
cannot inhere in any system of matter, because all matter 
is made up of several distinct beings, which never can 
make up one individual thinking being. 

" This is easily answered by a familiar instance. In 
every jack there is a meat-roasting quality, which neither 
resides in the fly, nor in the weight, nor in any particular 
wheel of the jack, but is the result of the whole composi- 
tion ; so, in an animal, the self-consciousness is not a real 
quality inherent in one being, (any more than meat-roasting 
in a jack,) but the result of several modes or qualities in 
the same subject. As the fly, the wheels, the chain, the 
weight, the cords, &c. make one jack, so the several parts 
of the body make one animal. As perception or conscious- 
ness is said to be inherent in this animal, so is meat-roasting 
said to be inherent in the jack. As sensation, reasoning, 
volition, memory, &c. are the several modes of thinking, 
so roasting of beef, roasting of mutton, roasting of pullets, 
geese, turkeys, &c. are the several modes of meat-roasting. 
And as the general quality of meat-roasting, with its 
several modifications as to beef, mutton, pullets, &c. does 
not inhere in any one part of the jack, so neither does 
consciousness, with its several modes of sensation, intellec- 
tion, volition, &c. inhere in any one, but is the result from 
the mechanical composition of the whole animal. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



443 



" Just so the quality or disposition of a fiddle to play 
tunes, with the several modifications of this tune-playing 
quality in playing of preludes, sarabands, jigs, and gavotts, 
are as much real qualities in the instrument, as the thought 
or the imagination is in the mind of the person that 
composes theiu." 

" It is well known to anatomists, that the brain is a 
congeries of glands that separate the finer parts of the 
blood called animal spirits ; that a gland is nothing but 
a canal of a great length, variously intorted and wound 
up together. From the arietation and motion of the 
spirits in those canals, proceed all the different sorts of 
thoughts." 

" We are so much persuaded of the truth of this our 
hypothesis, that we have employed one of our members, a 
great virtuoso at Nuremberg, to make a sort of an hydraulic- 
engine, in which a chemical liquor resembling blood is 
driven through elastic channels resembling arteries and 
veins, by the force of an embolus like the heart, and 
wrought by a pneumatic machine of the nature of the 
lungs, with ropes, and pulleys, like the nerves, tendons, and 
muscles ; and we are persuaded that this our artificial man 
will not only walk, and speak, and perform most of the 
outward actions of the animal life, but (being wound up 
once a-week) will perhaps reason as well as most of your 
country parsons." 1 

If, instead of asserting thought to be the result of the 
affection of many particles, in which case it must evidently 
partake the divisibility of the organ itself, and be not one 
but innumerable separate feelings, the materialist assert it 
to be the affection of a single particle, a monad, he must 
remember that if what he chooses to term a single particle, 
be a particle of matter, it too must still admit of division : 
it must have a top and bottom, a right side and a left ; it 

1 Pope's Works, vol. v. pp. 57-61. London, 1812. 



4i4? OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL . 

must, as is demonstrable in geometry, admit of being cut 
in different points, by an infinite number of straight lines ; 
and all the difficulty of the composition of thought, there- 
fore, remains precisely as before. If it be supposed so 
completely divested of all the qualities of matter, as not to 
be extended, nor consequently divisible, it is then mind 
which is asserted under another name, and every thing 
which is at all important in the controversy is conceded ; 
since all which can philosophically be meant by the imma- 
terialist, when the existence of mind is asserted by him, is 
the existence of an indivisible subject of all those affections 
which constitute the variety of our thoughts and feelings. 
If the materialist be unwilling to admit the word mind, in 
allowing the reality of a simple, unextended, and conse- 
quently indivisible subject of our various feelings, he may 
be allowed any other word which may appear to him pre- 
ferable ; even the word atom or particle, if he choose still 
to retain it. But he must admit, at least, that in this case, 
in the dissolution of the body, there is no evidence, from the 
analogy of this very bodily dissolution itself, of the destruc- 
tion of any such simple particle as that which he finds 
to be necessary for the explanation of the phenomena of 
thought. 

In whatever manner, therefore, the materialist may pro- 
fess to consider thought as material, it is equally evident 
that his system is irreconcilable with our very notion of 
thought. In saying that it is material he says nothing, 
unless he mean that it has those properties which we 
regard as essential to matter ; for without this belief he 
might as well predicate of it any barbarous term that is 
absolutely unintelligible, or rather might predicate of it 
such a barbarous term with more philosophic accuracy; 
since, in the one case, we should merely not know what 
was asserted ; in the other case we should conceive 
erroneously that properties were affirmed of the principle 
of thought which were not intended to be affirmed of it. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



445 



Matter is that which resists compression, and is divisible. 
Mind is that which feels, remembers, compares, desires. 
In saying of mind that it is matter, then, we must mean, if 
we mean any thing, that the principle which thinks is hard 
and divisible; and that it will be not more absurd to speak 
of the twentieth part of an affirmation, or the quarter of a 
hope, of the top of a remembrance, and the north and east 
corners of a comparison, than of the twentieth part of a 
pound, or of the different points of the compass in reference 
to any part of the globe of which we may be speaking. 
The true answer to the statement of the materialist, the 
answer which we feel in our heart, on the very expression 
of the plurality and divisibility of feeling, is, that it assumes 
what, far from admitting, we cannot even understand ; and 
that, with every effort of attention which we can give to 
our mental analysis, we are as incapable of forming any 
conception of what is meant by the quarter of a doubt, or 
the half of a belief, as of forming to ourselves an image of 
a circle without a central point, or of a square without a 
single angle. 

With respect to this possible geometry of sensations, as 
divisible into parts, I cannot but think that the too great 
caution of Mr. Locke, by giving the sanction of his eminent 
name to the possibility, at least, of the snperaddition of 
thought as a mere quality, to a system of particles, which, 
as a number of particles, have no thought, and yet have, as 
a whole, what they have not as parts of that whole, has 
tended in a great degree to shelter the manifest inconsis- 
tency of the doctrine of the materialist. He was unwilling 
to limit the divine power ; and from the obscurity of our 
notion of the connexion of the feelings of the mind, in any 
manner, with the changes induced in the bodily frame, he 
conceived that the annexation of thought to the system of 
particles itself, would be but a slight addition to difficulties 
that must at any rate be admitted. He forgot, however, 
that a system of particles is but a name for the separate 



416 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



particles which alone have any real existence in nature ; 
that the affirmation of what is contradictory, like plurality 
and unity, simplicity and complexity, is very different from 
the mere admission of ignorance ; and that, though we may 
not know any reason for which the Deity has been pleased, 
at least during our mortal state, to render sensations of our 
mind dependent on affections of our nervous system, there 
is no more absurdity in the affirmation of such a dependence, 
than in the assertion of any other physical connexion of 
events, — of material phenomena with material phenomena, 
or of mental phenomena with other phenomena of mind. 
If the presence of the moon, at the immense distance of its 
orbit, can affect the tendencies of the particles of water in 
our ocean, it may be supposed with equal readiness to pro- 
duce a change in the state of any other existing substauce. 
whether divisible into parts, that is to say, material, — or 
indivisible, that is to say, mind. But when thought is 
affirmed to be a quality of a system of particles, or to be 
one result of many co-existing states of particles, which 
separately are not thought, something more is affirmed 
than that of which we are merely ignorant of the reason. 
A whole is said to be different from all the separate and 
independent parts of a whole: this is one absurdity; and 
that which is felt by us as in its very nature simple and 
indivisible, is affirmed to be only a form of that which is, 
by its very nature, infinitely divisible. It is no daring 
limitation of the divine power to suppose, that even the 
Omnipotent himself cannot confound the mathematical 
properties of squares and hexagons ; and it would be no 
act of irreverence to his power, though it were capable of 
doing every thing which is not contradictory, to suppose 
that he cannot give to a system of organs a quality wholly 
distinct from the qualities of all the separate parts : since 
the organ itself is only a name which we give to those parts, 
that are all which truly exist as the organ, and have all an 
existence and qualities that are at every moment indepen- 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



447 



dent of the existence and qualities of every other atom, near 
or remote. 

Our sensations we know directly, — matter we know 
only indirectly, if we can be said to know its nature at all, 
as the cause of our sensations. It is that which, in certain 
circumstances, affects us in a certain manner. When we 
have said this, we have said all that can be considered as 
truly known by us with respect to it ; and in saying this, 
it is to our own feelings that the reference is made. Of the 
two systems, therefore, — the system which rejects all 
matter, and the system which rejects all mind, — there can 
be no question which is the more philosophic. The ma- 
terialist must take for granted every feeling for which the 
follower of Berkeley contends : he must admit, that it is 
impossible for us to know the absolute nature of matter, 
and that all which we can know of it is relative to ourselves, 
as sentient heings capable of being affected by external 
objects ; that our sensations are known to us directly, the 
causes of our sensations only indirectly ; and his system, 
therefore, even though we omit every other objection, may 
be reduced to this single proposition — that our feelings 
which we know, are the same in nature with that, of 
which the absolute nature, as it exists independently of 
our feelings, is, and must always be, completely unknown 
to us. 

From all the remarks which have now been made, I can- 
not but think that it is a very logical deduction, that our 
feelings are states of something which is one and simple, 
and not of a plurality of substances, near or remote ; that 
the principle of thought, therefore, whatever it may be, is 
not divisible into parts ; and that hence, though it may be 
annihilated, as every thing which exists may be annihilated 
by the will of him who can destroy as he could create, it 
does not admit of that decay of which the body admits — a 
decay that is relative to the frame only, not to the elements 
that compose it. 



418 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



When the body seems to us to perish, we know that it 
does not truly perish ; that every thing which existed in 
the decaying frame, continues to exist entire as it existed 
before ; and that the only change which takes place, is a 
change of apposition or proximity. From the first moment 
at which the earth arose, there is not the slightest reason 
to think that a single atom has perished. All that was is. 
And if nothing have perished in the material universe ; if 
even in that bodily dissolution, which alone gave occasion 
to the belief of our mortality as sentient beings, there is 
not the loss of the most inconsiderable particle of the dis- 
solving frame, the argument of analogy, far from leading 
us to suppose the destruction of that spiritual being which 
animated the frame, would lead us to conclude that it too 
exists as it before existed ; and that it has only changed its 
relation to the particles of our material organs, as these 
particles still subsisting have changed the relations which 
they mutually bore. As the dust has only returned to the 
earth from which it came, it is surely a reasonable inference 
from analogy, to suppose that the spirit may have returned 
to the God who gave it. 

Non secus ac quondam, tenebris et careere rupto 
Immitis caveae, Yolucrum regina repente 
Dat plausum coelo ingentem, nubesque repente 
Linquit, et adverse defigit lumina Phoebo, 
Seque auras intra liquidas et nubila condit. 1 

The belief of the immateriality of the sentient and think- 
ing principle, thus destroys the only analogy on which the 
supposition of the limitation of its existence to the period 
of our mortal life could be founded. It renders it necessary 
for those who would contend that we are spiritually mortal, 
to produce some positive evidence of a departure, in the 
single case of the mind, from the whole analogies of the 
economy of. nature ; and it renders doubly strong all the 

1 Heinsius de Contemptu Mortis. lib. i. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 449 



moral arguments which can be urged for its own indepen- 
dent immortality. 



LECTURE XXV. 

OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOL'L. 

The inquiry to which I directed your attention in my 
last Lecture, was that which relates to our prospect of im- 
mortality. 

The appearances which death exhibits, seem, when we 
first consider them, to mark so strongly the termination of 
every feeling which connected us with the once living 
object, that the continuance of these feelings, when every 
external trace of them is lost, may well be supposed to be 
viewed with disbelief by some, and with doubt by many. 
During their life, our direct communication with those who 
lived around us, was carried on by the intervention of 
bodily organs : in thinking of their very feelings, we have 
been accustomed to think of this bodily intervention, in 
what they looked, or said> or did ; and from the mere 
influence of the laws of association, therefore, it is not 
wonderful, that, when they can no longer look, or speak, or 
act, the kindness, which before could not exist without these 
corporeal expressions of it, should be regarded as no longer 
existing, at least should be so regarded by those who are 
not in the habit of any very nice analyses, of complicated 
processes or complex phenomena. 

Whatever other effects death may have, it is at least 
evident, that when it has taken place the bodily organs 
moulder away, by the influence of a decomposition more or 
less rapid. What was once to our eyes a human being, is 
a human being no more ; and when the organization is as 



450 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



if it had never been, every feeling and thought, if states of 
mere organs, must be also as if they had never been. The 
most interesting of all questions, therefore, with respect to 
our hopes of immortality, is, whether thought be a state of 
the mere organs, which decay thus evidently before our 
very eyes, or a state of something which our senses, that 
are confined to the mere organs, cannot reach ; of something 
which, as it is beyond the reach of our senses, may there- 
fore subsist as well, when every thing which comes under 
our senses, exists in any one state, as in any other state. 

With the examination of this point, my last lecture wa3 
almost wholly occupied ; and the arguments which I then 
offered, seemed to me to show decisively, that our sensa- 
tions, thoughts, desires, are not particles of matter, exist- 
ing in any number, or any form, of mere juxtaposition ; 
that the sentient and thinking principle, in short, is essen- 
tially one, not extended and divisible, but incapable by its 
very nature of any subdivision into integral parts, and 
known to us only as the subject of our consciousness, in all 
the variety of successive feelings, which we comprehend 
under that single name. 

When we have learned clearly to distinguish the organi- 
zation from the principle of thought, the mere change of 
place of the particles of the organic frame, which is all that 
constitutes death relatively to the body, no longer seems to 
imply the dissolution of the principle of thought itself, 
which is essentially distinct from the organic frame, and, by 
its very nature, incapable of that species of change which 
the body exhibits ; since it is very evident, that what is 
not composed of parts, cannot, by any accident, be sepa- 
rated into parts. 

To the mind which considers it in this view, then, death 
presents an aspect altogether different. Instead of the 
presumption, which the decaying body seemed to afford, of 
the cessation of every function of life, the very decay of 
the body affords analogies that seem to indicate the con- 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



451 



tinued existence of the thinkiDg principle ; since that which 
we term decay, is itself only another name of continued 
existence, of existence as truly continued in every thing 
which existed before, as if the change of mere position, 
which alone we term decay, had not taken place. The 
body, though it may seem to denote a single substance, is 
but a single word invented by us to express many co- 
existing substances : every atom of it exists after death as 
it existed before death ; and it would surely be a very 
strange error in logic to infer, from the continuance of every 
thing that existed in the body, the destruction of that which, 
by its own nature, seemed as little mortal as any of the 
atoms which have not ceased to exist ; and to infer this 
annihilation of mind, not merely without any direct proof 
of the annihilation, but without a single proof of destruction 
of any thing else, since the universe was formed. Death 
is a process in which every thing corporeal continues to 
exist ; therefore, all that is mental ceases to exist. It 
would not be easy to discover a link of any sort that might 
be supposed to connect the two propositions of so very 
strange an en thy mem e. 

The possibility of such annihilation of the mind, no one 
who admits the corresponding power of creation will deny, 
if the Deity have given auy intimation, tacit or expressed, 
that may lead us to believe his intention of destroying the 
spirit, while he saves every element of the body. But the 
question is not, whether it be possible for him who created 
the mind to annihilate it ; it is, whether we have reason to 
believe such annihilation truly to take place ; and of this 
some better proof must be offered, than the continuance, 
even amid apparent dissolution, of all that truly constituted 
the body, every atom of which it was, without all question, 
equally possible for divine power to destroy. We surely 
have not proved that the whole frame of suns and planets 
will perish to-morrow, nor even given the slightest reason 
to suspect the probability of this event, because we may 



452 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



have shown beyond all dispute, that the Deity may, if such 
be his will, reduce to-morrow, or at this very moment, the 
whole universe to nothing. 

The very decay of the body then, as I hare said, bears 
testimony, not to the destruction, but to the continuance of 
the undying spirit, if the principle of thought be truly differ- 
ent from the material frame. The mind is a substance dis- 
tinct from the bodily organs, simple, and incapable of 
addition or subtraction ; Nothing which we are capable of 
observing in the universe has ceased to exist, since the 
universe began. These two propositions, as far as analogy 
can have weight, — and, since the mind of any one is incapable 
of being directly known to us as an object, it is the analogy 
of the bodily appearances alone that can have any weight, 
— these two propositions, instead of leading by inference to 
the proposition, The mind, which existed as a substance 
before death, ceases wholly to exist after death, — lead rather, 
as far as the mere analogy can have influence, to the oppo- 
site proposition, The mind does not perish in the dissolution 
of the body. In judging according to the mere light of 
nature, it is on the immaterialism of the thinking principle 
that I consider the belief of its immortality to be most 
reasonably founded ; since the distinct existence of a spiri- 
tual substance, if that be admitted, renders it incumbent on 
the assertor of the mortality of the spirit to assign some 
reason, which may have led the only being who has the 
power of annihilation, to exert his power in annihilating 
the mind which he is said in that case to have created only 
for a few years of life. 

If, therefore, but for some direct divine volition, the 
spiritual substance, we have every reason to suppose, would 
continue to subsist, as every thing else continues to subsist, 
the only remaining question in such a case is, whether, 
from our knowledge of the character of the Deity, as dis- 
played in his works, especially in the mind itself, we have 
reason to infer, with respect to the mind, this peculiar will 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



453 



to annihilate it, — without which, we have no reason to 
suppose it to be the only existing thing that is every 
moment perishing in some individual of our kind. The 
likelihood of such a purpose in the Divinity may be inferred, 
if it can be at all inferred, in two ways — from the nature 
of the created mind itself, as exhibiting qualities which 
seem to mark it as peculiarly formed for limited existence, 
and from our knowledge of the Creator, as displaying to 
us in his works indications of such a character, as of itself 
might lead us to infer such a peculiar intention. 

That, in the nature of the simple indivisible mind itself, 
there is nothing which marks it as essentially more perish- 
able than the corpuscles to which we give the name of 
masses, when many of them are in close juxtaposition, but 
which are themselves the same, whether near or remote, 
than the unperishing atoms of the leaf, that continues still 
entire in every element, while it seems to wither before us; 
or of the vapour, in which all that truly existed exists as 
before, while it is only to our eyes that it seems to vanish 
into nothing, I need not use any arguments to show. Mind, 
indeed, like matter, is capable of existing in various states, 
but a change of state is not destruction in one more than 
in the other. It is as entire in all its seeming changes as 
matter in all its seeming changes. There is no positive 
argument, then, that can be drawn from the nature of the 
thinking principle, to justify the assertion, that while 
matter does not perish even in a single atom, it, and it only 
ceases to exist ; and it would be enough that no positive 
argument could be drawn from it in support of an opinion 
that is inconsistent with the general analogy of nature, and 
unsupported by any other proof of any kind, though no 
negative arguments could be drawn from the same source. 
Every argument, however, which can be derived from it is 
of this negative sort, indicating in mind a nature, which of 
itself, if there be any difference of degree, might seem riot 



454 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



more but less perishable than those material atoms which 
are acknowledged to continue as they were, entire in all 
the seeming vicissitudes of the universe. 

I am aware, indeed, that in judging from the mind itself, 
a considerable stress has often been laid on the existence of 
feelings which admit of a very easy solution, without the 
necessity of ascribing them to any instinctive foreknowledge 
of a state of immortal being. Of this sort, particularly, 
seems to me an argument which, both in ancient and modern 
times, has been brought forward as one of the most power- 
ful arguments for our continued existence, after life has 
seemed to close upon us for ever. I allude to the universal 
desire of this immortal existence. But, surely, if life itself 
be pleasing, and even though there were no existence be- 
yond the grave, life might still, by the benevolence of him 
who conferred it, have been rendered a source of pleasure, it 
is not wonderful that we should desire futurity, since futurity 
is only protracted life. It would indeed have been worthy 
of our astonishment, if man, loving his present life, and 
knowing that it was to terminate in the space of a very few 
years, should not have regretted ti e termination of what he 
loved, that is to say, should not have wished the continu- 
ance of it beyond the period of its melancholy close. 

The universal desire, then, even if the desire were truly 
universal, would prove nothing but the goodness of Him 
who has made the realities of life, or if not the realities, the 
hopes of life so pleasing, that the mere loss of what is pos- 
sessed or hoped, appears like a positive evil of the most 
afflicting kind. 

Equally powerless I consider the argument for the reality 
of a state of higher gratification, which is often drawn from 
the constant renewal and constant disappointment of every 
earthly hope ; from that eager and unremitting wish of 
something better, which even the possession of delights, 
that are counted inestimable by all but their possessor, is 
insufficient to suppress. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



455 



Old Rome consulted birds. Lorenzo, thou 
With more success the flight of hope survey, 
Of restless hope, for ever on the wiug. 
High-perch'd o'er every thought that falcon sits, 
To fly at all that rises in her sight ; 
And never stooping but to mount again, 
Next moment she betrays her aim's mistake, 
And owns her quarry lodged beyond the grave. 1 

The mere activity of hope, however, as we thus pass 
ceaselessly from wishes that have been gratified to other 
wishes, proves only that the Deity has, with a gracious view 
to the advantage of society, formed us for action, and, form- 
ing us for action, h is given us a principle which may urge 
us to new pursuits, when otherwise we might, in the idleness 
of enjoyment, have desisted from exertions which required to 
be sustained in their vigour by new desires. Though 
nothing were to exist beyond the grave, hope, in all its 
variety of objects, would still be useful for animating to 
continued, though varied exertion, and, as thus beneficial 
to the successive races of mortal beings, would have been 
even then a gift not unworthy of divine benevolence. 

The sublime attainments which man has been capable of 
making in science, and the wonders of his own creative art 
in that magnificent scene to which he has known how to 
give new magnificence, have been considered by many as 
themselves proofs of the immortality of a being so richly 
endowed. When we view him, indeed, comprehending in 
his single conception the events of ages that have preceded 
him, and, not content with the past, anticipating events 
that are to begin, only in ages as remote in futurity as the 
origin of the universe is in the past, measuring the 
distance of the remotest planets, and naming in what 
year of other centuries the nations that are now gazing 
with astonishment on some comet are to gaze on it in 
its return, it is scarcely possible for us to believe that a 



1 Night Thoughts, Night vii, 



456 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



mind, which seems equally capacious of what is infinite in 
space and time, should be only a creature, whose brief 
existence is measurable by a few points of space and a few 
moments of eternity. 

Nonne hanc credideres mentem, quae nunc quoque coelum 
Astraque pervolitat, delapsam coelitus, illuc 
Unde abiit remeare, suasque revisere sedes ? 

Look down on earth. What seest thou ? Wondrous things, 

Terrestrial wonders that eclipse the skies. 

What lengths of labour'd lands ! What lorded seas ; 

Lorded by man, for pleasure, wealth, or war. 

Seas, winds, and planets, into service brought, 

His art acknowledge, and promote his ends. 

Nor can the eternal rocks his will withstand. 
What levelPd mountains, and what lifted vales ! 
O'er vales and mountains, sumptuous cities swell, 
And gild our landscape with their glittering spires. 
How the tall temples, as to meet their Gods, 
Ascend the skies ! The proud triumphal arch 
Shows us half heaven, beneath its ample bend. 
High through mid air, here streams are taught to flow ; 
Whole rivers there, laid by in basins, sleep : 
Here plains turn oceans ; there vast oceans join, 
Through kingdoms, channell'd deep from shore to shore. 
How yon enormous mole, projecting, breaks 
The mid-sea's furious waves ! Their roar amidst, 
Out-speaks the Deity, and says, a main, 
Thus far, nor farther !" Measured are the skies, — 
Stars are detected in their deep recess, — 
Creation widens, vanquish'd Nature yields ; 
Her secrets are extorted. Art prevails ! 
What monument of genius, spirit, power ! 

And now, if justly raptured at this scene, 
Whose glories render heaven superfluous, say, 
Whose footsteps these % Immortals have been here ; 
Could less than souls immortal this have done ! 1 

These glorious footsteps are indeed the footsteps of in - 
1 Night Thoughts, Night wk : 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 457 

mortals ! Yet it is not the mere splendour of the works 
themselves, on which this argument insists so much, that 
seems directly to indicate the immortality of their authors. 
Man might be mortal, and yet perform all these wonders, 
or wonders still more illustrious. It is not by considering 
the relation of the mind to the monuments of its art, as too 
excellent to be the work of a perishable being, but by con- 
sidering the relations of a mind capable of these to the 
being who has endowed it with such capacities, and who is 
able to perpetuate or enlarge the capacities which he has 
given, that we discover in the excellence which we admire, 
not a proof indeed, but a presumption of immortality ; a 
presumption, at least, which is far from leading us to infer 
any peculiar intention in the preserver of the body to an- 
nihilate the mind. That God has formed mankind for 
progressive improvement, is manifest from those suscepti- 
bilities of progress which are visible in the attainments of 
every individual mind ; and still more in the wider contrast 
which the splendid results of science in whole nations, that 
may be considered almost as nations of philosophers, now 
exhibit, when we think, at the same time, of the rude arts 
of the savage, in his hut or in the earlier cave, in which he 
seemed almost of the same race with the wild animal with 
which he had struggled for his home. But, if God love the 
progress of mankind, he loves the progress of the different 
individuals of mankind ; for mankind is but another name 
for these multitudes of individuals ; and if he love the pro- 
gress of the observers and reasoners, whom he has formed 
with so beautiful an arrangement of faculties, capable of 
adding attainment to attainment in continual progress, is it 
possible for us to conceive that, when the mind has made 
an advance which would render all future acquisitions even 
on earth proportionately far more easy, the very excellence 
of past attainments should seem a reason for suspending the 
progress altogether ; and that he, who could have no other 
wish than the happiness and general excellence of man in 

x 



458 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



forming him what be is, should destroy his own gracious 
work, merely because man, if permitted to continue longer 
in being, would be more happy and excellent ? If the pro- 
gressive faculties of man afford no proof that the Deity 
wills his continued progress, they surely afford no evidence 
of a divine unwillingness to permit it ; and we must not 
forget that the mind has been shown to be not more truly 
mortal of itself than the undecaying elements of the body ; 
that if there be truly a substance mind, the annihilation of 
this substance is in itself as difficult to be conceived as the 
annihilation of any other substance ; and that, before we 
believe in the miraculous exclusive annihilation of it, some 
reason is to be found, which might seem to influence the 
Deity, who spares every thing corporeal, to destroy every 
thing mental. We have, therefore, to conceive the mind at 
death matured by experience, and nobler than it was when 
the Deity permitted it to exist, and the Deity himself, with 
all those gracious feelings of love to man which the adapta- 
tion of human nature to its human scene displays ; and in 
these very circumstances, if we affirm without any other 
proof the annihilation of the mind, we are to find a reason 
for this annihilation. If even we, in such a moment, 
abstracting from all selfish considerations, would feel it a 
sort of crime to destroy with no other view than that of the 
mere destruction, what was more worthy of love than in 
years of earlier being, are we to believe that he, who loves 
what is noble in man more than our frail heart can love it, 
will regard the improvement only as a signal of destruc- 
tion ? Is it not more consonant to the goodness of him 
who has rendered improvement progressive here, that, in 
separating the mind from its bodily frame, he separates it 
to admit it into scenes in which the progress begun < n 
earth may be continued with increasing facility ? 

Q,uare same animum ; neque enim sapientia dia 
Frustra operam impendit ; neque mens arctabitur istis 
Limitibus, quibus hoc periturum corpus ; at exsors 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



459 



Terrenae labis viget, aeternumque vigebit ; 
Atque ubi corporeis emissa, ut carcere, vinclis, 
Libera cognatum repetet, vetus incola, coelum, 
Nectareos latices Veri de fonte perenni 
Hauriet, aetheriumque perennis carpet amomum. 1 

In this light, in which the Deity is considered as willing 
the happiness of man, and the intellectual and moral pro- 
gress of man, which is surely the character that is most 
conspicuous in the arrangements even of this earthly life, 
we find in this very character, in its relation to the sepa- 
rated spirit, not motives to destroy, which we must presume 
at least that we have found, before we take for granted 
that what now has existence is to cease to exist ; but, on 
the contrary, motives to prolong an existence which as yet 
has fulfilled only a part of the benevolent design of crea- 
tion. It may be only a slight presumption which we are 
hence entitled to form, but at least whatever presumption 
we are entitled to form, is not unfavourable to our hopes of 
immortality. 

There is another moral character in which the Deity may 
be considered at such a moment — the character of justice, 
or at least of a moral relation analogous to that which in 
man we term justice. In this too may be found equal, or 
still stronger presumptive evidence, that the years of our 
earthly joy or sorrow are not the whole of our existence. 

The force of the argument consists in the unequal distri- 
bution of happiness on earth, as not proportioned to the 
virtues or the vices of those to whom it is given. 

Virtue, indeed, cannot be very miserable, and Yice can- 
not permanently be very happy. But the virtuous may 
have sorrows, from which the vicious are free, and the 
vicious have enjoyments not directly accompanied with 
vice, — enjoyments which the virtuous, who seem to us to 
merit them better, do not possess. Increase of guilt, even 

1 I. Hawkins Browne. 



4G0 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



by stupifying the conscience, may occasion less rather than 
more remorse; and the atrocious profligate be less miserable 
than the timid and almost penitent victim of passions, which 
overpower a reluctance that is sincere, even when it is too 
feeble to make adequate resistance to the overwhelming 
force. It is to futurity, therefore, that we must look for 
the equalizing, if any equalizing there be, of the present 
disproportions. 

I am aware of an argument which may be adduced to 
obviate the force of the reasoning that is founded on the 
prospect of such moral retribution. If, in the present state 
of things, the virtuous are rewarded, aud the vicious 
punished, we do not need a future state for doing what has 
been done already ; and if the virtuous are not rewarded, 
nor the vicious punished, in that only scene of which we 
have any experience, what title have we to infer, from this 
very disorder, qualities in the Supreme Ruler of the world, 
which the present scene of his government does not itself 
display ? 

The argument would indeed be, I will readily admit, 
most forcible, if we had no mode of discovering the moral 
sentiments of the Sovereign of nature, unless in the pain or 
pleasure which he bestows ; and if no advantages were to 
flow from the unequal distribution of happiness on earth, 
that could reconcile these with a high moral character of 
the Governor of the universe. But, if such advantages do 
truly arise from the temporary disproportion as compen- 
sated afterwards by the distributions of another life, and if 
the moral character of God be discoverable by us in other 
ways, the argument which supposes us to have no other 
mode of inferring the divine character than by the mere 
distribution of pleasure and pain, must lose its weight. 
If the temporary disproportion be of advantage upon the 
whole, he who is benevolent cannot fail to will that very 
disproportion, which is thus by supposition advantageous ; 
and he who has all the sources of happiness in his power, 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



461 



through every future age, can have no difficulty in accom- 
modating a little temporary and necessary disproportion to 
justice the most exact. These important points will deserve 
a little fuller elucidation. 

In the first place, then, the moral sentiments of the 
Euler and Judge of the world are discoverable in other 
ways, as well as by the temporary allotments which he has 
made of paiu or pleasure. He who has placed conscience 
in every bosom, to approve or condemn, speaks to every 
one in that voice of conscience. What every human being 
is forced to detest, cannot be regarded by us as indifferent 
to him who has rendered hatred of it inevitable in us. 
What every bosom is taught, as if by some internal 
awarder of love, to regard with veneration, must be re- 
garded too as acceptable in the eyes of him who has made 
us feel it as a species of crime to withhold our love. God, 
then, approves of virtue ; he loves the virtuous ; he has the 
power of giving happiness to those whom he wills to render 
happy ; and if, having this power, he do not make happy 
for the few moments of life those whom we cannot but con- 
sider him as loving, it must be for a reason which is itself 
a reason of benevolence. 

Such a reason, I .may remark, in the second place, is 
easily discoverable, and indeed has been already treated by 
me at such great length, as to render it unnecessary for me 
now to dwell on it. If the virtuous were necessarily happy 
here, and happy in proportion to their virtue, there could 
not be those noble lessons by which occasional suffering 
strengthens the virtue which it exercises. There could not, 
for the same reason, be those gentle services of compassion 
which cherish virtues of another class. If the guilty were 
the only sufferers, pity would be feeble, and might even 
perhaps be morally unsuitable in some measure, rather than 
praise wor thy. In the case of vice itself, we see a reason, 
and a most benevolent reason, why the pain of remorse 
should often be more severe, in the slighter delinquencies of 



462 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



those who are only novices in guilt, than in the fearless 
cruelties and frauds of the hardened and impenitent sinner. 
It is in the early stages of vice, before the influence of habit 
is formed, that -the heart may be most easily led back to 
better feelings ; and it is then, accordingly, when it may 
be most efficacious, that the voice which calls to desist, 
speaks with its loudest expostulations and warnings. 

The present system of temporary disproportion, then, is 
not, when the general character of the divine estimator of 
human actions is sufficiently marked in another manner, 
inconsistent in the slightest degree with supreme moral 
excellence; but, on the contrary, when all its relations, 
especially those most important relations to the virtue that 
is awakened by it and fostered, are taken into account, 
may be said to flow from that very excellence. But still, 
important as the temporary advantages may be, for pro- 
ducing that consciousness of virtue which could not be 
known without opportunities of trial, and the very virtues 
themselves that imply sufferings which are not the necessary 
result of guilt, it is only by its relation to the moral 
advantage, that the disproportion is even at present recon- 
cilable with the justice and goodness which we delight to 
contemplate in our Maker, and Preserver, and Judge. 
That conscience which he has placed within us, as if to bear 
his own authority, and to prompt us as his own benevolence 
would prompt us, to the actions which it may be as delight- 
ful to remember as to perform ; that very distinguisher of 
good and evil, by which, and by which only, we learn to 
love even the benevolence which formed us ; the benevolence, 
to whose just and bounteous regard we look with confidence 
through all the ages of eternity ; this principle of all equity, 
by which alone we know to be just ourselves, and to 
reproach ourselves for any failure in justice, seems, in the 
very language with which it calls on us to make compen- 
sation for our own disproportionate awards, to reveal to us 
the compensations of another world, as flowing necessarily 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



463 



from the very goodness and power of him, to whose com- 
prehensive and equal view of all the ages of the universe, 
and of all that, in those ages, is to be felt or done, futurity 
itself may almost be said to be constantly present. The 
distinction of life and death at least, which to our eye is so 
important, is to him but the distinction of a moment ; and 
if that brief moment of mortal life, though it be a moment 
of suffering, can give to the immortal spirit everlasting 
remembrances of virtue, he who makes it, for important 
purposes, a moment of suffering, can assign to the sufferer 
that immortality, to which the remembrance of the heroic 
disregard of peril, or of the equally heroic patience that 
disdained to repine even in torture itself, may be a source 
of happiness, which, in such circumstances, it would not 
have been benevolence to have withheld. 

These considerations of the Deity, as manifestly willing 
the intellectual and moral progress of his creatures, which 
death suspends, and as a just estimator of the actions of 
mankind, whose awards may be considered as proportioned 
to the excellence which he loves, — these two views of the 
relation of man and his Creator, might lead us to some 
presumptive expectation of future existence, even though 
we had no positive proof of any spiritual substance within 
us, that might remain entire, in the mere change of place 
of the bodily elements ; a change which is the only bodily 
change in that death which we are accustomed to regard as 
if it were a cessation of existence, but in which every thing 
that existed before, continues to exist with as perfect 
physical integrity as it before existed. 

Even in this view of man, his future existence as a living 
being, though not so obvious and easy of conception, might 
still seem a reasonable inference from the character of the 
Divinity, in its relation to the earthly progress and earthly 
sufferings of a creature whom it would be impossible for us 
to regard as an object of indifference to the Power that 
marked him out for our own admiration. But, in this view, 



464 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



the argument for immortality would be comparatively 
feeble. We are uot to forget, as I have already repeated, 
that mind is itself a substance distinct from the bodily 
elements ; that when death itself is only a change of the 
mutual relations of atoms, all of which exist as before, with 
all their qualities, there is no reason of analogy that can 
lead us to suppose the mind, as a substance, to be the only 
thing which perishes ; that in such a case, therefore, 
positive evidence is necessary, net to make us believe the 
continued existence of the mind, when nothing else is 
perishing, but to make us believe that the Deity, who 
destroys nothing else, in death destroys those very minds, 
without relation to which the whole material frame of the 
universe, though it were to subsist for ever, would be 
absolutely void of value. It would not he a little, then, to 
find merely that there is no positive evidence which can 
lead us to suppose such exclusive annihilation of spiritual 
existence. But how much more is it to find, instead of such 
positive evidence of destruction, presumptions of the 
strongest kind, which the character of the Deity, as made 
known to us in his works, and especially in our hearts, can 
afford, that the life which depended on his goodness on 
earth, will be a subject of the moral dispensations of his 
goodness and justice, after all that is truly mortal about us 
has not perished indeed, but entered into new forms of 
elementary combination. " Cum venerit dies ille qui mix- 
turn hoc divini humanique secernat corpus, hoc, ubi inveni 
reiinquam : ipse me diis reddam. Nec nunc sine iilis sum ; 
sed gravi terrenoque detineor. Per has mortalis aevi 
moras, illi meliori vitae longiorique proluditur. Quemad- 
modum novem mensibus nos tenet maternus uterus, et 
praeparat non sibi sed illi loco in quern videmur emitti, 
jam idonei spiritum trahere, et in aperto durare; sic per 
hoc spatium,. quod ab infantia patet in senectutem, in alium 
maturescimus partuni. Alia origo nos expectat, alius rerum 
status. Nonduin coelum nisi ex intervallo pati possumus. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



Quicquid circa te jacet rerum, tanquam hospitalis loci 
sarcinas specta: transeundum est. Excutit redeuntem 
natura, sicut intrantem. Dies iste, queni tanquam extremum 
reformidas, aeterni natalis est." 1 

The day which we falsely dread as our last, is indeed the 
day of our better nativity. We are maturing on earth for 
heaven; -and even on earth, in those noble studies which 
seem so little proportioned to the wants of this petty scene, 
and suited rather to that state of freedom in which we may 
conceive our spirit to exist when delivered from those 
bodily fetters which confine it to so small a part of this 
narrow globe, there are presages of the diviner delights 
that await us, — marks of that noble origin from which the 
spirit was derived. These indications of its celestial origin 
are beautifully compared by Heinsius, in his very pleasing 
poem, De Contemptu Mortis, to the gleams of the spirit of 
other years with which a gallant courser, condemned to 
the drudgery of the plough, seems still to show that it was 
formed for a nobler office. 

Ut cum fortis equus Pisaeae victor olivae, 
Aut quern sanguineus saeva ad certamina Mavor^ 
Deposcit, fremitusque virum, lituosque tubasque, 
Nunc misero datus agricolae, pede creber inertem 
Pulsat humum, patriamque domum testatur et ignem 
Naribus, et curvum collo aversatur aratrum. 3 

The continuance of our existence, in the ages that follow 
the few years of our earthly life, is not to be regarded only 
in relation to those ages. Even in these few years which 
we spend on earth, comparatively insignificaut as they may 
seem when we think at the same time of immortality, it is, 
to him who truly looks forward to the immortality, as that 
for which human life is only a preparation, the chief source 
of delight, or of comfort, in occasional afflictions. If this 
l\fe were indeed all, the sight of a single victim of oppres- 

1 Seneca, Epist. cii. 2 Liber ii. 

x 2 



466 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



sion would be to us the most painful of all objects, except 
the sight of the oppressor himself; and though we might 
see sufficient proofs of goodness, to love Him by whom we 
were made, the goodness would, at the same time, appear 
to us too capricious in many instances, to allow us to rest 
on it with the confidence which it is now so delightful to us 
to feel, when we think of Him in whom we confide. In 
the sure prospect of futurity, we see that unalterable 
relation, with which God and virtue are for ever connected, 
— the victim of oppression, who is the sufferer, and scarcely 
the sufferer, of a few moments here, is the rejoicer of endless 
ages ; and all those little evils which otherwise would be so 
great to us, seem scarcely worthy even of our regret. AVe 
feel that it would be almost as absurd, or even more absurd, 
to lament over them and repine, as it would be to lament, 
if we were admitted to the most magnificent spectacle 
which human eyes had ever beheld, that some few of the 
crowd through which we passed had slightly pressed against 
us, on our entrance. 

All now is vanish'd. Virtue sole survives 

Immortal, never-failing friend to man, 

His guide to happiness on high. And see, 

'Tis come, the glorious morn, the second birth 

Of heaven and earth. Awakening Nature hears 

The new-creating word, and starts to life 

In every heighten'd form, from pain and death 

For ever free. The great eternal scheme, 

Involving all, and in a perfect whole 

Uniting, as the prospect wider spreads, 

To Reason's eye refined clears up apace. 

Ye vainly wise, ye blind presumptuous, now 

Confounded in the dust, adore that power 

And wisdom oft arraigned : see now the cause 

Why unassuming worth in secret lived 

And. died neglected; why the good man's share 

In life was gall and bitterness of soul ; 

Why the lone widow and her orphans pined 

In starving solitude, while luxury 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



467 



In palaces lay straining her low thought 

To form unreal wants : why heaven-born truth, 

And moderation fair, wore the red marks 

Of superstition's scourge. Ye good distress'd. 

Ye noble few, who here unbending stand 

Beneath life's pressure, yet bear up a while, 

And what your bounded view, which only saw 

A little part, deem'd evil, is no more. 

The storms of wintry time will quickly pass, 

And one unbounded Spring encircle all. 1 



LECTURE XXVI. 

RETROSPECT OF THE ARGUMENT FOR THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL ; 
OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 

My last two Lectures hare been devoted to the very 
interesting inquiry into the grounds which reason, without 
the aid of revelation, affords, for our belief of the immor- 
tality of the sentient and thinking principle, — of that 
principle which is the life of our mortal frame, but which 
survives the dissolution of the frame which it animated. 
The importance of the subject will justify, or rather 
demand, a short retrospect of the general argument. 

It is from the dissolution of the body that the presump- 
tion as to the complete mortality of our nature is derived : 
and it was therefore necessary, in the first place, to consider 
the force of this presumption as founded on the organic 
decay. If thought be only a state of those seemingly con- 
tiguous particles which we term organs, the separation of 
these particles may be the destruction of the thought ; but 
if our sensations, thoughts, emotions, be states of a substance 

1 Thomson's Seasons ; conclusion of Winter. 



468 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



which itself exists independently of the particles, that by 
their juxtaposition obtain the name of organs, the separation 
of these particles to a greater distance from each other, 
(which is all the bodily change that truly takes place in 
death,) or even the destruction of these particles, if what 
we term decay, instead of being a mere form of continued 
existence, were absolute destruction, would not involve, 
though it might or might not be accompanied by tho 
annihilation of the separate principle of thought. 

The result of this primary and most important examina- 
tion was, that far from being a state of any number of 
particles, arranged together in any form, thought cannot 
even be conceived by us to be a quality of number or 
extension ; that it is of its very essence not to be divisible ; 
and that the top or bottom of a sentiment, or the half or 
quarter of a truth or falsehood, or of a joy or sorrow, are at 
least as absurd to our conception as the loudness of the 
smell of a rose, or the scarlet colour of the sound of a 
trumpet. 

An organ is not one substance, because we term it one. 
It is truly a multitude of bodies, the existence and qualities 
of each of which are independent of the existence and 
qualities of all the others ; as truly independent as if, 
instead of being near to each other, they were removed to 
distances relatively as great as those of the planets, or to 
any other conceivable distances in the whole immensity of 
space. If any one were to say, the Sun has no thought ; 
Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and all 
their secondaries, have no thought ; but the solar system 
has thought, — we should then scarcely hesitate a single 
moment in rejecting such a doctrine ; because we should 
feel instantly that there could be no charm in the two words 
solar system, which are of our own invention, to confer on 
the separate masses of the heavenly bodies what, under a 
different form of mere verbal expression, they had been 
declared previously not to possess. What the sun and 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



469 



planets have not, the solar system, which is nothing more 
than that sun and planets, has not ; or, if so much power 
be ascribed to the mere invention of a term, as to suppose 
that we can confer by it new qualities on things, there is a 
realism in philosophy far more monstrous than any which 
prevailed in the logic of the schools. 

If, then, the solar system cannot have properties which 
the sun and planets have not, and if this be equally true, 
at whatever distance, near or remote, they may exist in 
space, it is surely equally evident that an organ, — which is 
only a name for a number of separate corpuscles, as the 
solar system is only a name for a number of larger masses 
of corpuscles, — cannot have any properties which are not 
possessed by the corpuscles themselves, at the very moment 
at which the organ as a whole is said to possess them ; nor 
any affections as a whole, additional to the affections of the 
separate parts. An organ is nothing, the corpuscles to 
which we give that single name are all ; and if a sensation 
be an organic state, it is a state of many corpuscles, which 
have no more unity than the greater number of particles in 
the multitudes of brains which form the sensations of all 
mankind. Any one of the particles in any brain has an 
existence as complete in itself, and as independent of the 
existence of the other particles of the same brain, which are 
a little nearer it, as of the particles of other brains, which 
are at a greater distance. Even though it were admitted, 
however, in opposition to one of the clearest truths in 
science, that an organ is something more than a mere name 
for the separate and independent bodies which it denotes, 
and that our various feelings are states of the sensorial 
organ, it must still be allowed, that, if two hundred 
particles existing in a certain state form a doubt, the divi- 
sion of these into two equal aggregates of the particles, as 
they exist in this state at the moment of that particular 
feeling, would form halves of a doubt ; that all the truths 
of arithmetic would be predicable of each separate thought, 



470 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



if it were a state of a number of particles : and the truths 
of geometry be in like manner predicable of it, if it 
depended on extension and form. In short, if joy or 
sorrow, simple and indivisible as they are felt by us to be, be 
not one, but a number of corpuscles separate and divisible 
into an infinite number of little joys and sorrows, that may 
be variously arranged in spheres and parallelopipeds, any 
thing may, with equal probability, be said to be any thing, 
however aj)parently opposite and contradictory. 

When sensation is said to be the result of organization, 
the vagueness of the term result throws a sort of illusive 
obscurity over the supposed process, and we more readily 
admit the assertion with the meaning which the materialist 
would give to it ; because, however false it may be in his 
sense, it is true in another sense. Sensation is the result of 
organization, — a result, however, not in the organs them- 
selves, but in a substance of which the Deity has so 
arranged the susceptibilities, as to render the variety of 
that class of feelings which we term sensations, the effects 
of certain states of the particles which compose the organ. 
The result, therefore, is one and simple, because the mind, 
that alone is susceptible of the state which we term sensa- 
tion, is one and simple, though the bodily particles of the 
state of which the one sensation is the result are many. A 
sound, for example, is one, because it is an affection of the 
mind which has no parts, and must always be one in all its 
states, though the mental affection may have required, 
before it could take place, innumerable motions of innu- 
merable vibratory particles, which have no unity but in 
their joint relation to the mind, that considers them as one, 
and is affected by their concurring vibrations. In like 
manner, in the phenomena of chemical agency, to which 
the phenomena of thought and feeling, as simple results, 
are by the materialists most strangely asserted to be 
analogous, it surely requires no very subtile discernment to 
perceive, that, though we may speak of the result of certain 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



471 



mixtures, as if the result were one of simple combustion, 
deflagration, solution, precipitation, and the various other 
terms which are used to denote chemical changes, it is in 
the single word alone, that all the unity of the complex 
phenomenon is to be found, — that the solution of salt in 
water, or the combustion of charcoal in atmospheric air, 
expresses not one fact, but as many separate facts as there 
are separate particles dissolved or burnt ; — that the 
unity, in short, is not in the chemical phenomena as 
facts, but in the mind, and only in the mind, which con- 
siders all these facts together; and that the mere words 
combustion and solution either signify nothing, or signify 
states of innumerable particles, which are not the less 
innumerable because they are comprehended in a single 
word. 

Sensation, then, which is not more truly felt by us in any 
case, as a pleasure or a pain, than it is felt to be one and 
incapable of division, is not a state of many particles, which 
would be as many separate selves, without any connecting 
principle that could give them unity, but a state of a single 
substance, which we term mind, when we speak of it gene- 
rally, or self, when we speak of it with reference to its own 
peculiar series of feelings. 

There is mind, then, as well as matter, or rather, if there 
be a difference of the degrees of evidence, there is mind 
more surely than there is matter ; and if at death not a 
single atom of the body perishes, but that which we term 
dissolution, decay, putrefaction, is only a change of the 
relative positions of those atoms, which in themselves con- 
tinue to exist with all the qualities which they before 
possessed, there is surely no reason, from this mere change 
of place of the atoms that formed the body, to infer, with 
respect to the independent mind, any other change than 
that of its mere relation to those separated atoms. The 
continued subsistence of every thing corporeal cannot, at 
least, be regarded as indicative of the annihilation of the 



472 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



other substance, but must, on the contrary, as far as the 
mere analogy of the body is of any weight, be regarded as 
a presumption in favour of the continued subsistence 
of the mind, when there is nothing around it which has 
perished, and nothing even which has perished, in the 
whole material universe, since the universe itself was called 
into being. 

The Deity, however, though he have not chosen to 
annihilate a single atom of matter, since he created, the 
world, may, it will be admitted, have chosen to annihilate 
every spiritual substance. But with the strong analogy 
of matter, which is the only substance that is capable of 
being perceived by us, in favour of the continued existence 
of the mind, it would be necessary, for the proof of the 
supposed spiritual mortality, to show some reason which 
may be believed to have influenced the Supreme Being to 
this exclusive annihilation. The assertor of the soul's 
immortality, — if the existence of the soul as a separate 
substance be previously demonstrated, — has not so much to 
assign reasons for the belief of its immortality, as to obviate 
objections which may be urged against that belief. At the 
moment of death there exists the spirit ; there exist also 
the corporeal atoms. At that moment, the Deity allows 
every atom to subsist as before. The spirit, too, if he do 
not annihilate it, will subsist as before. If we suppose him 
to annihilate it, we must suppose him to have some reason 
for annihilating it. Is any such reason imaginable, either 
in the nature of the spirit itself, or in the character of the 
Deity ? 

Instead of any such reason for annihilation, that might 
be supposed to justify the assertion of it, we found, on the 
contrary, reasons which might of themselves lead us to 
expect the continued existence, far more probably than the 
destruction of the soul. If the Deity will, as it is evident 
from the whole frame of our minds that he most truly wills, 
the progress of mankind, he must will the progress of the 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



473 



individuals of mankind; since mankind is but a name for 
the individuals who compose it ; and if he will the progress 
of individuals, there can be no reason that he should love 
that progress less, when the individual is capable of making 
greater advances, and that, merely on account of that 
greater capacity, he should destroy what he sustained with 
so much care for that partial progress which he now 
delights to suspend. In the state of the spirit, then, at the 
moment of death, there is nothing which seems to mark it 
out for exclusive annihilation. 

Are we to find a reason for this, then, in the character of 
the Deity himself? On the contrary, would not his 
annihilation of the soul, when every motive for continuing 
its existence, as far as we may presume to think of the 
motives of the Deity, in accordance with the general design 
exhibited by him, in the more obvious appearances of the 
universe, seems rather stronger than weaker, imply a sort 
of capricious inconsistency in the divine character which 
the beautiful regularity of his government of the world 
leaves us no room to infer? Nay, more, may we not 
almost venture to say, that a future state of retribution is 
revealed to us in those divine perfections which the universe 
so manifestly exhibits, and in those moral feelings which 
are ever present to our heart ? Every seeming irregularity 
in the sufferings of the good, and in the unequal distribution 
of happiness, admits, in this way, of being reconciled with 
those high moral perfections which the voice of conscience 
within us, by its uniform approbation of virtue and dis- 
approbation of vice, proclaims to belong to Him who has 
made it a part of our very nature thus to condemn and 
approve. The temporary inequalities are, in the meantime, 
evidently of moral advantage. But still, these supposed 
irregularities of suffering and enjoyment, though in the 
highest degree useful, as we found, for the production and 
fostering of virtue, and of all the delights of conscience 
which may attend the virtuous through immortality, and 



474 OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



therefore justly a part of the benevolent dispensations of 
God on earth, are reconcilable with his moral perfections, 
only by the immortality of the spirit, which, after suffering 
what virtue can suffer for a few years of life, may rejoice 
for ever in the presence of that God, in devout submission 
to whose will, what the world counted suff Ting was scarcely 
what required an act of fortitude to endure it. 

In whatever light, then, at the moment of death, we 
consider either the soul itself or its Creator, we discover 
reasons rather of continuing its existence than of annihilating 
it. The evidence of this sort may be strong, or it may be 
weak ; but, weak or strong, it is at least favourable to the 
affirmative side of the question. We have not merely, then, 
the powerful presumption, for the continued existence of 
the spirit, which arises from the continuance, even in what 
we term decay, of every thing corporeal ; but we have, to 
strengthen this presumption still more, every argument 
which can be drawn from our knowledge of the divine 
character, to which alone we are to look for the evidence 
of His intention to annihilate or preserve, as we have seen, 
from the inadequacy of mere matter to account for the 
phenomena of thought. If there be a spiritual substance 
existing at the moment of death, which would continue to 
subsist but for the divine will, which alone can annihilate, 
as it alone can create, we find not merely that it is im- 
possible to assign any positive reason, which may be 
supposed to influence the Deity to annihilate what he had 
formed, but that there are positive reasons which might 
lead us to expect his continued preservation of it. We 
have, in short, for the immortality of the soul, from the 
mere light of nature, I will not say evidence that is 
demonstrative and irresistible, for that was left to be 
revealed to us by a more cloudless light, but at least as 
strong a combination of presumptive evidence, negative and 
positive, as we can imagine such a subject, in the obscurity 
of human reason, to possess. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



475 



The objections sometimes urged against the immortality 
of the thinking principle, from the influence of disease, or 
of age, which i3 indeed itself a species of disease, but an 
incurable one, on the mental faculties, are of no force when 
urged against the system of those who admit the existence 
both of matter and mind, and the connexion which the 
Deity has in so many relations established, of our bodily 
and mental part. Our sensations are as much states of the 
mind, as any other of our mental affections. That the 
slightest puncture of our cuticle by the point of a pin, or 
the application of a few acrid particles to our nostrils, 
should alter completely, for the time, the state of the 
thinking principle, might as well be urged in disproof of 
the immortality of the soul, as the same sort of connexion 
of mind and body which the imbecility of disease exhibits. 
If the nervous system were to continue long in precisely 
the same state as that which is produced by the puncture 
of a pin, it is evident that the mind would be as little 
capable of reflection as in dotage or madness ; and in 
dotage or madness, the nervous system is not disordered for 
a few moments, but continues to exist in a certain state 
for a length of time, with which, of course, during that 
length of time, the state of the mind continues to correspond. 
If the momentary nervous affection arising from the 
puncture, then, be no proof of the soul's mortality, and 
prove only its susceptibility of being affected by the body 
to which its Creator has united it, I do not see how the 
more lasting influence of the more lasting nervous affection 
can be a proof of any thing more. " Suppose a person," 
says Cicero, " to have been educated from infancy in a 
chamber, in which he could see objects only through a 
small chink in the window-shutter, would he not be apt to 
consider this chink as essential to his vision, and would it 
not be difficult to persuade him, that his prospect would be 
enlarged by the demolition of the walls of his temporary 



476 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



prison V In such a case as that which Cicero has supposed, 
if the analogy may be extended to the present objection, it 
is evident, at least, that, if the aperture were closed for 
years, or if the light transmitted through it, for the same 
length of time, were merely altered in tint, by the inter- 
position of some coloured transparent body, these changes 
would as little imply any blindness or defect of vision, as 
if the darkening or tinging of the light in its passage 
through the aperture had occurred only for a few moments* 
The longest continued disorder of the nervous system then, 
I repeat, whatever corresponding mental affections it may 
induce, proves nothing more with respect either to the 
mortality or the immortality of the sentient and thinking 
principle, than the shorter affection of the nerves and brain, 
which is followed in any of our momentary sensations by its 
corresponding mental change. If the mind were, during 
our earthly existence, absolutely independent of the body 
during its union with it, it would indexl be wonderful that 
any bodily disease should be found to affect it; but if it 
have susceptibilities of affection that are, in many respects, 
accommodated to certain states of the bodily organs, the 
real wonder would be, if a disordered state of the bodily 
organs were not followed by any corresponding change in 
the state or affections of the mind. 

The result of this long disquisition will, I hope, be a 
deeper conviction in your minds of the force of the evidence* 
which even human reason affords, of the great truth for 
which I have contended. " Quicquid est illud, quod sentit, 
quod sapit, quod vult, quod viget, coeleste et divinum est/' 
says Cicero, " ob eamque rem aeternum sit necesse est." 
It is of celestial origin, he says, because in its remembrance 
of the past, and foresight of the future, and wide com- 
prehension of the present, there are characters of the 
divinity, which nothing that is of the gross mixture of 
earth can partake. 



OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 



477 



u Hinc sese," says the author of one of the noblest 
modern Latin poems on this noble subject, De Immor- 
tal itate Animi, 

Hinc sese in vita supra sortemque situmque 
Evehit humanum ; nunc coelo devocat astra, 
Intima nunc terrae reserat penetralia victrix ; 
Quaeque oculos fugiunt tenuissima corpora promit 
In luceni, panditque novi miracula mundi. 
Ecquid enim per se pollet magis, aut magis haustus 
Indicat aethereos, genus et divinitus ortum ? 
Atque adeo dum corporis stant foedera nexus, 
Exit saepe foras tamen, effugioque parat se ; 
Ac veluti terrarum hospes, non incola, sursum 
Fertur, et ad patrios gestit remeare penates. 1 

After these observations on the doctrines of natural 
theology, with respect to the being and perfections of God, 
the services of duty which it is not so much the obligation 
as it is the privilege and highest glory of our nature to pay, 
in the devotion of our heart, to a Being so transcendent, 
and the prospect of that immortal existence in which, after 
the scene of earthly things is closed upon our view, we 
are still to continue under the guardianship of the same 
provident goodness which sustained, us during the years 
that are termed by us our life, as if exclusively constituting 
it, though they are only the infancy, as it were, or the 
first few moments of a life that is everlasting; I return 
now to the only subdivision of our moral conduct which 
remained to be considered by us, that which relates 
immediately to our own welfare, the duty, as it has been 
termed, which we owe to ourselves. The phrase is not a 
very happy one ; but it is sufficiently expressive of that 
direct relation to self, which is all that is meant to be 
understood in the conduct to which the phrase is applied. 
The consideration of this, you will remember, I postponed, 
till we had considered those doctrines of religion to which, 



] I. Hawkins Browne. 



478 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



in their relation to our happiness, and in a great measure 
to our virtue also, this part of our moral conduct particularly 
refers. 

Our duty to ourselves, to retain then the common form of 
expression, may be considered in two lights, as it relates to 
the cultivation of our moral excellence, and to the cultiva- 
tion of our happiness, in the sense in which that term is 
commonly understood, as significant of continued enjoy- 
ment, whatever the source of the enjoyment may be. It 
may be thought, indeed, that these two views exactly coin- 
cide; but though it is certain that even on earth they 
usually coincide, and must coincide still more exactly when 
our immortal existence is considered, they are yet, in 
reference to our w r ill or moral choice, distinct objects. We 
will to be virtuous, not because virtue is productive of most 
happiness, and is recognised by us as its purest and most 
permanent source, but without any view at the moment to 
that happiness, and simply with a view to the moral 
excellence, without which we should feel ourselves un- 
worthy, not of happiness merely, which we value much, 
but of our ow 7 n self-esteem and of the approbation of God, 
which we value more. The attachment of happiness to the 
fulfilment of duty, arises only from the gratuitous goodness 
of Heaven. The same benevolent Being who has made it 
delightful to us to give and to have given relief, has placed 
in our bosom a principle of compassion that is of earlier 
operation ; by which we hasten to relieve, and have already 
perhaps given the relief, before we have paused to think of 
the delight which the generous feel. It is the same in our 
contemplation of every duty. We have already desired 
to be w r hat we can esteem, before we have thought of any 
thing more in the particular case, than of the duty and of 
•the esteem itself. The happiness may, indeed, follow the 
desire of moral excellence, but the happiness was not the 
object of thought at the very moment when the moral 
excellence was desired. He who counts only the pleasure 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL EXCELLENCE. 



479 



which the offices of virtue are to yield, and who acts as 
virtue orders, therefore, only because vice does not offer to 
her followers so rich a salary, is unworthy, I will not say 
merely of being a follower of virtue, but even of that 
pleasure which virtue truly gives only to those who think 
less of the pleasure than of the duty which the pleasure 
attends. " What calculation," says Seneca, " is so basely 
sordid as that which computes the price at which it may 
be advantageous to be a good man ? — Inveniuntur qui 
honesta in mercedem colant, quibusque non placet virtus 
gratuita ; quae nihil habet in se magnincum, si quidquam 
venale. Quid enim est turpius, quam aliquem computare, 
quanti vir bonus sit ?" 1 

The duty which consists in the desire of rendering our- 
selves morally more excellent, and the cultivation, accord- 
ingly, of all those affections which render us more benevolent 
to others, and more firm in that heroic self-command which 
resists alike the influence of pleasure and of pain, is then, 
in its direct object, different from that other branch of the 
duty to ourselves which regards our happiness as its 
immediate end. It is unnecessary, however, to enlarge on 
the former of these, since the desire of our moral excellence 
is the desire of excellence in all those virtues which have 
been already under our review. It would be needless, 
therefore, to repeat, in any minute detail, with respect to 
the mere desire of cultivating these virtues, remarks which 
have been anticipated in treating of the virtues themselves. 
The only observations which it is still of importance to 
make, relate to the effect which every separate breach of 
duty may have in lessening the tendency to virtue, and, 
consequently, in derogating from the general excellence of 
the moral character. It thus acquires a sort of double 
delinquency; first, as a breach of some particular duty; 
and, secondly, as an additional breach of that duty, which 

1 De Beneficiis, lib. iv. cap. i. 



480 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



should lead us to confirm our moral excellence as much n? 
possible, by every act of virtue which the circumstances of 
our situation will allow us to perform ; and, at least, by 
abstinence from vice in situations in which no opportunity 
of positive virtue is allowed to us. 

It is this relation of present actions to the future charac- 
ter, indeed, which forms, to the reflecting mind, the chief 
element in its moral consideration of far the greater part of 
human conduct, — of all that part of it which comprehends 
the little actions of ordinary life. It is but rarely that we 
are assailed with temptations to great evil ; and when we 
are so assailed, the evil itself, and the seductive circum- 
stances that would tempt us to it, are too prominent and 
powerful not to absorb the whole attention of the mind, 
distracting it in a sort of conflict, or hurrying it along, 
according to the force of the moral hatred of guilt that 
overcomes or is overcome. In such cases, then, we think 
of the present, and scarcely of more than of the present. 
But how few are the cases of this kind, and how much 
more frequently are we called to the performance of actions 
in which, if the circumstances of the particular moment 
alone be considered, the virtue has little merit, or the vice 
little delinquency. It is of many such little delinquencies, 
however, that the guilt is ultimately formed, which is 
afterwards to excite the indignant wrath of every breast, 
except of that one in which the horrors of remorse, stilled, 
perhaps, in the dreadful moments of active iniquity, are all 
that is to be felt in the still more dreadful intervals from 
crime to crime. It is not of base perfidy, then, nor of 
atrocious cruelty, that it is necessary to bid the ingenuous 
mind beware, but of offences, in which that ingenuous mind, 
untaught as yet to discern the future in the present, sees 
only the little frailties that, as proofs of a common nature, 
are pitied by those who contemplate them, rather than 
condemned ; and attract, perhaps, in this very pity, an 
interest which is more akin to love than to hate. It is in 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL EXCELLENCE. 481 

these circumstances only, or at least chiefly in these cir- 
cumstances, that the moral character is in peril. There is 
not a guilty passion from which the heart would not shrink, 
if that passion were to present itself instantly, with its own 
dreadful aspect. But while the pleasures and the less 
hideous forms of vice mingle together, in what may almost 
be termed the sport or pastime of human life, we pass 
readily and heedlessly from one to the other, till we learn 
at last to look on the passion, when it introduces itself 
among the playful band, only as we gaze on some fierce 
masquer in a pageant that assumes features of darker 
ferocity only to delight us the more, or which we approach 
at least with as little apprehension as if it were the gentle 
form of Virtue herself that was smiling on us. It is from 
the beginnings of vice that we are to be saved, then, if we 
are to be saved from vice itself. "Were it given to us to 
picture the future, as we can paint what is before our eyes ; 
and could we show to the boy, as he returns blooming and 
scarcely fatigued, from the race or other active game in 
which he has been contending with his playmates, some 
form of feeble age, the few gray hairs, the wrinkled front, 
the dim eye, the withered cheek, the wasted limbs, that 
cannot bear, without additional support, even that thin 
frame which bends over them to the earth that is soon to 
receive all that is not yet wholly dead and consumed in the 
half-living skeleton; could we say to him, as he gazes 
almost with terror on this mixed semblance of death and 
life, The form on which you are now looking is your own, 
— how incredulous would be his little heart to our pro- 
phetic intimation ! It would seem to him scarcely possible 
that any number of years should convert what he then felt'; 
and saw in his own vigorous frame, into that scarcely 
breathing thing of feebleness and misery, which, when a 
few of those years had passed over him, he was truly to • 
become. ' It .would be the same with the moral futurity as ! 
with that of the mere animal being* Could we foresee and* 



482 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



exhibit, in like manner, the future heart ; could we show 
to him who has dormant passions, that have not yet been 
awakened by any temptation, and who is, therefore, full of 
the confidence of virtue, — to him who loves, perhaps, the 
happiness of others, which has never interfered with his 
own, and is eager, therefore, to confer on them all those 
enjoyments which cost no sacrifice of enjoyment on his 
part ; to such a mind, and, in some cases, even to a mind 
far nobler, could we present the moral picture of some 
deceiver, and plunderer, and oppressor, some reveller in 
the luxury of riches fraudulently usurped, and even of the 
scanty rapine of poverty itself, that had still something 
which could be torn from it by exactions, which it was too 
friendless to know how to resist ; and, in presenting this 
picture, could we say, The guilt at which you shudder, is 
the guilt of the very bosom that is shrinking from it with 
indignation, — how difficult would it be, or rather how 
impossible, to convince the criminal of other years, of his 
own horrible identity with all the villanies which he 
loathed. Yet there can be no question that there are 
cases in which the moral progression is as regular, from 
innocence to mature and hoary iniquity, as the mere 
corporeal progress, from the beauty and muscular alacrity 
of youth, to the weakness and pale and withered emacia- 
tion of age. 

It is the knowledge of this fatal progression, then, from 
less to greater vice, which far more than doubles the obli- 
gation of abstaining from those slight immoralities, which 
might seem trifling if it were not for this progressive 
tendency. No evil is slight which prepares the heart for 
greater evil. The highest duty which we owe to ourselves, 
is to strengthen, as much as it is in our power to strengthen, 
every disposition which constitutes or forms a part of moral 
excellence; and we err against this high duty, and prepare 
ourselves for erring against every other duty, as often as 
we yield to a single seduction, whether it be to do what is 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL EXCELLENCE. 483 



positively unworthy, or to abstain from the humblest act of 
virtue which our duty calls to us to perform. In yielding 
once to any vicious desire, we lose much more than the 
virtue of a single moment ; for while the desire, whatever 
it may be, is increased by indulgence, the mere remembrance 
that we have once yielded, is to us almost like a license to 
yield again. The second error seems to save us from the 
pain of thinking, that the temptation which we before 
suffered to vanquish our feeble virtue, was one which even 
that feeble virtue was capable of overcoming ; and our pre- 
sent weakness is to us as it were a sort of indistinct and 
secret justification of the past. 

The virtuous man, then, who loves as he should love the 
noble consciousness of virtue, and who feels, therefore, that 
no gain of mere sensual pleasure or worldly honour would 
be cheaply purchased by a sacrifice of moral excellence, 
will think often, when such a purchase might be made by 
a sacrifice so slight, that to others it might seem scarcely 
a diminution of virtue, rather of the whole moral excellence 
which he endangers, than of the little portion of it with 
which he is called to part. He will not say within him- 
self, how inconsiderable and how venial would be this 
error ; but, to what crimes may this single error lead ! He 
will thus be saved from the common temptations, by which 
minds less accustomed to a sage foresight are at first gently 
led where they gladly consent to go, and afterwards hurried 
along where it is misery to follow, by a force which they 
cannot resist, — by a force which seemed to them at first the 
light touch of the gentle hand of a grace or a pleasure, but 
which has expanded progressively at every step, till it ha* 
become the grasp of a giants arm. 

The duty that is exercised in resisting the solicitations of 
evils that can scarcely be said to be yet vices, though they 
are soon to become vices, and are as yet, to our unreflect- 
ing thought, only forms of gaiety and social kindness, i$ 
trnly one of the most important duties of self-command. It 



484 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



is not the endurance of pain, that is the hardest trial to 
which fortitude can be exposed ; it is the calm endurance, 
if I may so term it, of the very smiles of Pleasure herself, 
—an endurance that is easy only to the noble love of future 
as well as present virtue, that can resist what it is delight- 
ful to crowds to do, as it resists the less terrible forms of 
evil, from which every individual of the crowd would 
shrink ; and the courage of those who have strength only 
to resist what is commonly termed fear, is a courage that is 
scarcely worthy of the name, — as little worthy of it as the 
partial courage of the soldier on his own element, if on a 
different element he were to tremble when exposed to a 
shipwreck ; or of the seaman, if he were in like mariner to 
tremble at any of the common perils to which life can be 
exposed on land. The most strenuous combatants in the 
tumult of warfares, may be cowards, or worse than cowards, 
in the calm moral fight. 

They yield to pleasure, though they danger brave, 

And show no fortitude but in the field. 

His is the only genuine strength of heart, who resists not 
the force of a few fears only, to which even in the eyes 
of the world it is ignominious for man to yield ; but the 
force of every temptation, to which it would be un-> 
worthy of man to yield, even though the world, in its 
capricious allotments of honour and shame, might not have 
chosen to regard with ignominy that peculiar species of 
cowardice. 

By pleasure unsubdued, unbroke by pain, 
He shares in that Omnipotence he trusts ; 
All-bearing, all-attempting, till he falls ; 
And, when he falls, writes Vici on his shield. 1 

The duty which we owe to ourselves, as it leads us to 
value our own moral purity, leads us then to resist the 
solicitation of pleasures that would debase us ? as it leads us 

1 Night Thoughts, Night viii. '•' . < : 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL EXCELLENCE. 



4S5 



to endure pain itself. To endure pain is however, in like 
manner, a part of this duty, not merely from those high 
motives that have been already considered by us, the 
motives of grateful submission, which are drawn from the 
contemplation of the moral government of the world, by 
that wisdom and goodness under whose gracious dispensa- 
tion the capacity of suffering itself has been arranged, so as 
to minister to the highest purposes which supreme bene- 
volence could have in view, but also from the subordinate 
motives that regard only ourselves. To be querulously 
impatient, is but to add another evil, that might be avoided, 
to evil that already exists, and at the same time to throw 
from us one of the most powerful consolations which even 
that amount of existing evil admitted, — the consolation of 
knowing that we are able to bear what it is virtue to bear, 
and of trusting that we shall be able in like manner to 
endure, without repining, whatever other ills it may be our 
mortal allotment to encounter, and our duty to overcome, 
in the only way in which such ills can be overcome, by 
the patience that sustains them. By yielding to habits 
of cowardly discontent, we continually lessen more and 
more that internal vigour which might save us from the 
miserable cowardice that makes almost every act of virtue 
a painful effort, till we become at last the moral slaves of 
every physical evil, and therefore of every human being 
who is capable of inflicting on us any one of those ills. He 
never can be the master of his own resolutions, who does 
not know how to endure what it may be impossible to avoid 
without the sacrifice of virtue. When we hear of the 
usurper and oppressor of Roman liberty, who, when a 
whole world was prostrate before him, had subdued every 
thing but the inflexible spirit of a single heroic scorner of 
slavery, and of the inflicter of slavery, 

Et cuncta terrarum subacta, 

Praeter atrocem animum Catonis — 1 

1 Horat. Carm. lib. ii. ode i. 



486 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



we do not need to be told, that he who could thus dare to 
offer to liberty its last homage, was not one whom mere 
suffering could appal. 

Justum et tenacem propositi virum 
Non civium ardor prava jubentium, 
Non yultus instantis tyranni 

Mente quatit solida ; — neque Auster, 
Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae, 
Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus. 
Si fractus illabatur orbis, 
Impavidum ferient ruinae. 1 



LECTURE XXVII. 

OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 

In my last Lecture I began the consideration of that 
minor species of moral obligation which constitutes the 
propriety of certain actions, considered merely as terminat- 
ing in the individual who performs them, — the duty, as it 
has been termed, which we owe to ourselves. 

This duty I represented as having two great objects ; in 
the first place, the moral excellence of the individual, and 
in the second place, his happiness when any enjoyment, or 
the acquisition of the means of future enjoyment, is not 
inconsistent with that moral excellence, the cultivation of 
which is, in every case, even with respect to the mere per- 
sonal duty, of primary obligation. 

In my last Lecture, accordingly, I considered the former 
of these divisions of our duty to ourselves — illustrating 
especially the relation which a single action may bear to 

1 Horat. Carm. lib. iii. ode Hi. 



CULTIVATION OF HAPPINESS. 



487 



the whole moral character in after life, by the increased 
tendency which it induces to a repetition of it, and a cor- 
responding diminution of the abhorrence with which the 
action, if vicious, was previously viewed ; and endeavouring, 
therefore, to impress you strongly with the importance of 
habits of self-command, by which alone, as enabling us 
to resist alike the gayer seductions of luxury, and the 
terror of personal suffering, we may be masters of our own 
moral resolutions, in circumstances in which vice might 
seem attended only with present pleasure, and virtue only 
with present pain. 

After considering that division, then, which regards the 
cultivation of our moral excellence, I proceed now to con- 
sider the other branch of our duty to ourselves, of which 
our happiness is the immediate object. 

When happiness is to be attained without the breach of 
any duty, it becomes a positive duty to pursue it ; as, in 
like manner, though no other duty were to be violated than 
that which we owe to ourselves, it would still be a violation 
of this duty to act in such a manner as to lessen our own 
happiness, or to occasion to ourselves actual distress. It is 
a virtue, in short, to be prudent, a vice to be imprudent ; 
or if prudence and imprudence should be considered as im- 
plying rather the knowledge or the ignorance of actions 
that may be advantageous to us or hurtful, than the per- 
formance of actions which we know to be advantageous to 
us or hurtful, — it is a virtue to act in such a manner as 
seems to us most prudent, a vice to act in such a manner as 
seems to us imprudent. 

That there is not merely a satisfaction or regret, as at 
some piece of good or bad fortune, but a moral duty 
observed or violated, in these cases, is evident from the 
conscience of the agent himself, and from the feelings of 
those who contemplate his action. He who suffers from 
acting in a manner which he had reason to consider as 
imprudent, feels that he is justly punished ; and all who 



488 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



consider bis action and its consequence?, agree in thfci 
reference of demerit to the agent, and in the feeling of pro- 
priety in the punishment which he has received, or rather 
which he may be said to have inflicted on himself. Nor 
can we wonder that the Deity, who Allied the happiness of 
his creatures, and who made virtue, upon the whole, the 
most efficacious mode of contributing even to happiness in 
this life, should have made the wilful neglect of that which 
was in so many important respects the great object of 
moral feeling, an object itself of a species of moral disap- 
probation. If every individual of mankind were in everv 
respect perfectly careless of his own happiness, everv 
individual of mankind would be unhappy ; and mere im- 
prudence, if universal, would thus have the same injurious 
consequences as the universal oppression of all by all. 
From the harmony which the Deity has pre-established of 
virtue and utility, that conduct alone can be most virtuous, 
which, if universally adopted, would contribute most to the 
good of the universe ; and the imprudent, therefore, are, 
to the extent of their wilful violation of the happiness of 
<»ne individual, viekters of the universal system of good. 

Our own happiness, then, is a moral object, as the hap- 
piness of others is a moral object. There is much more 
reason, however, upon the whole, to fear that individuals 
will be neglectful of the happiness of others rather than of 
their own, when opportunities of furthering either may 
have occurred to them ; since, with respect to each person- 
ally, his own desire of pleasure, and consequently of all the 
means of pleasure, may be considered as so powerful as 
scarcely to require the aid of any mere feeling of moral 
duty, to call on him to be prudent. It is accordant, there- 
fore, with the gracious benevolence of the Power who has 
arranged our susceptibilities of feeling, in relation to the 
circumstances in which we are placed, that the sentiment 
of moral obligation should there be strongest, where the 
additional influence is most needed ; and that, while it is of 



CULTIVATION OF HAPPINESS. 



489 



our own happiness we are, at least in ordinary circumstances, 
most desirous, it should yet seem to us, in the very privacy 
of our own conscience, a greater moral delinquency to in- 
vade any enjoyment possessed by another, than to sacrifice, 
by any rash folly, the means of similar enjoyment possessed 
by ourselves. 

It is still, however, more than mere regret which we feel 
on considering any such imprudent sacrifice. There is 
truly a feeling of moral disapprobation — a feeling that in 
thus injuring the happiness of one individual of mankind, 
we have violated a part of the general system of duty, 
which in the actions that relate to himself only, as well as 
in the actions which relate directly to others, a wise and 
virtuous man should have constantly before him for the 
direction of his conduct. 

It is morally fit, then, that every individual should en- 
deavour to acquire and preserve the means of happiness, 
when the happiness is to be acquired or preserved without 
the breach of any of the duties of still stronger obligation 
which he may owe to communities or to other individuals. 

But if the acquisition of happiness be his duty, in what 
manner is he to seek it ? that is to say, in what objects is 
he to hope to find it ? 

Happiness ! our being's end and aim ! 

Good, pleasure, ease, content, whate'er thy name ! 

That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh, 

For which we bear to live, or dare to die ! 

Which still so near us, yet beyond us lies, 

O'erlook'd, seen double, by the fool and wise. 

Plant of celestial seed ! if dropt below, 

Say, in what mortal soil thou deign'st to grow ? 

Fair op'ning to some court's propitious shine, 

Or deep with diamonds in the flaming mine ; 

Twined with the wreaths Parnassian laurels yield, 

Or reap'd in iron harvests of the field ? 

Where grows % where grows it not I If vain our toil, 

We ought to blame the culture, not the soil ; 

Y 2 



490 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



Fix'd to no spot is happiness sincere, 
'Tis nowhere to be found, or every where. 1 

Happiness, considered as mere happiness, may be defined 
to be, a state of continued agreeable feeling, differing from 
what is commonly termed pleasure only as a whole differs 
from a part. Pleasure may be momentary ; but to the 
pleasure of a moment we do not, at least in common lan- 
guage, give the name of happiness, which implies some 
degree of permanence in the pleasure. 

As happiness, however, is only a more lasting state of 
pleasure or agreeable feeling, it is evident that every object, 
the remembrance, or possession, or hope of which is agree- 
able, is a source of happiness ; one of many sources, because 
there are innumerable objects which, as remembered, pos- 
sessed, or hoped, are agreeable. Some of these may indeed 
exclude others, and the objects excluded may be sources of 
purer or more lasting pleasure, which it would be impru- 
dent therefore to abandon for a less good. But all are still 
sources of happiness, if happiness be agreeable feeling ; and 
the only moral question relates to the choice. 

It is evident, too, that this choice of happiness, as far as 
it depends on the intensity and duration of enjoyment, 
must be various in its objects in different individuals, ac- 
cording to their original constitution, education, habits, rank 
in life, or whatever else may be conceived to modify the 
desires of mankind. The saving of a few guineas, which, 
to the greater number, of the rich, at least, would afford no 
gratification, may be a source of very great delight to those 
whose circumstances of humbler fortune condemn them to 
be necessarily frugal; or even to the possessor of many 
thousand acres, if he have the misfortune to be a miser. 
With every variety of taste, in whatever manner induced, 
there is a corresponding happiness of possession : a gem, a 
painting, a medal, which many would rank with the mere 



1 Essay on Ma i, Ep. iv. 1»16» 



CULTIVATION OF HAPPINESS. 



491 



baubles of a toyshop, are treasures to a few. The loss of a 
single book of difficult acquisition, which may be a serious 
evil to a man of letters, is scarcely felt as a loss by one 
who sees books before him, as mere pieces of gay and gilded 
furniture, without the slightest desire of opening them, and 
whose library is perhaps the only room of his house which 
he never thinks of entering, or which he uses at least only 
for such purposes as any other room, with any other furni- 
ture, might serve as well. What is true of these sources 
of enjoyment, is true of every object of desire which some 
value much, while others perhaps regard it as insignificant, 
or at least regard it as comparatively of far less value. In 
thinking of what is to give delight, we must think at least 
as much of the mind that is to be delighted, as of the object 
which we may choose to term delightful. There are, pro- 
bably, not two individuals to whom the acquisition of 
exactly the same objects would afford exactly the same 
quantity of happiness ; and in a question of mere happiness, 
therefore, without regard to duty, it is as absurd to inquire 
into one universal standard, as to think of discovering one 
universal stature, or universal form of the infinitely varied 
features of mankind. 

This inquiry, however, into one sole and exclusive stan- 
dard of happiness, which seems so absurd when we consider 
the ever-varying tastes and fancies of mankind, was the 
great inquiry of the ancient philosophers. Happiness was 
to them not so much a generic name of many agreeable 
feelings, as a sort of universal a parte rei, — something 
which was one and simple, or which at least excluded any 
great diversity of the objects that corresponded with it. 
Instead, therefore, of sage calculations on the comparative 
amount of pleasure which different classes of objects might 
be expected to afford to the greater number of mankind, 
they have left to us a bold assertion of one species of hap- 
piness, as if it were the sole, — and many vain refinements, 
by which they would endeavour to reduce to it every other 



492 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



form of delight, and where they could not so reduce them, 
to disprove the existence of enjoyments so obstinately un- 
accommodating ; of enjoyments, however, as real and as 
independent in themselves, as that for the sole existence of 
which they contended. 

The two principal sects opposed to each other in this 
inquiry into happiness, were the followers of Epicurus and 
Zeno ; the former of whom regarded sensual pleasure as 
primarily the only real good, and every thing that was not 
directly sensual, as valuable only in relation to it ; while 
the other sect contended, that there was no good whatever 
but in rectitude of conduct : that, but for this rectitude of 
choice, pleasure was not a good, pain not an evil. 

The slightest consideration of the nature of the mind, as 
susceptible of various species of enjoyment, might seem 
sufficient to disprove the doctrine of both these rival sects. 
That our chief happiness, the happiness of far the greatest 
portion of our life, has no direct reference to the senses, is 
abundantly evident, and is admitted even by Epicurus 
himself ; though he would still labour vainly to refer them 
remotely to that source ; and though the virtues and in- 
tellectual acquirements, which adorn our nature infinitely 
more than any superior quickness of sensation, may be so 
traced through all their consequences, as to be found ulti- 
mately to contribute to the amount even of the pleasures of 
the senses, this influence on the senses is certainly the 
least part of their influence on happiness. The love of the 
parent for the child, of the child for the parent, all the de- 
lightful charities which render home a scene of perpetual 
joy, and which extend themselves beyond the domestic 
roof, with so wide a growth of affection : the sublime or 
tender remembrances of virtue ; or in mere science, the 
luxury of truth itself, as an object of desires that may al- 
most be said to be intellectual passions; the pleasure of the 
astronomer, in contemplating those seeming sparks of light, 
which to his senses are truly mere sparks of light, and 



CULTIVATION OF HAPPINESS. 



493 



which are magnificent orbs only to the intellect that com- 
prehends and measures their amplitude ; the pleasure of 
the mathematician, in tracing relations of forms which his 
senses are absolutely incapable of presenting to him ; of the 
poet, in describing scenes of beauty which his eyes never 
are to see; — all these pleasures, intellectual and moral, are 
pleasures, whether they tend or do not tend to heighten 
mere sensual enjoyment ; and if nothing were to be left of 
them but this influence on the senses, human life would 
scarcely be worthy even of the brutal appetites that might 
still strive to find on earth the objects of their grovelling 
and languid and weary desire. 

So false, then, even as a mere physical exposition of 
happiness, is the system of Epicurus. But if his philosophy 
err more grossly, the philosophy of the Stoical school, 
though it err more sublimely, is still but a sublimer error. 
The moral excellence of man is unquestionably what Zeno 
and his followers maintained it to be, a devout submission 
to the will of the Supreme Being, by the exercise of those 
virtues for which every state in which we can be placed, 
allows an opportunity of exercise. It never can be accord- 
ing to the real excellence of his nature to act viciously, nor 
a violation of his real excellence to act virtuously ; but 
though all pleasure which is inconsistent with virtue is to 
be avoided, the pleasure which is consistent with virtue is 
to be valued, not merely as being that which attends 
virtue, but as being happiness, or at least an element of 
happiness. Between mere pleasure and mere virtue, there 
is a competition, in short, of the less with the greater ; but 
though virtue be the greater, and the greater in every case 
in which it can be opposed to mere pleasure, pleasure is still 
good in itself, and would be covetable by the virtuous in 
every case in which the greater good of virtue is not incon- 
sistent with it. Pain is, in like manner, an evil in itself; 
though to bear pain without a murmur, or without even 
any inward murmurs, be a good, — a good dependent on 



494 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



ourselves, which it is in our power to add at any moment 
to the mere physical ill that does not depend on us, and a 
good more valuable than the pain in itself is evil. 

It is, indeed, because pleasure and pain are not in them- 
selves absolutely indifferent, that man is virtuous in resist- 
ing the solicitations of the one, and the threats of the other ; 
and there is thus a self-confutation in the principles of 
Stoicism, which it is truly astonishing that the founder of 
the system, or some one of the ancient and modern com- 
mentators on it, should not have discovered. We may 
praise, indeed, the magnanimity of him who dares to suffer 
every external evil which man can suffer, rather than give 
his conscience one guilty remembrance ; but it is because 
there is evil to be endured, that we praise him for his mag- 
nanimity in bearing the evil ; and if there be no ill to be 
endured, there is no magnanimity that can be called forth 
to endure it. The bed of roses differs from the burning 
bull, not merely as a square differs from a circle, or as flint 
differs from clay, but as that which is physically good 
differs from that which is physically evil ; and if they did 
not so differ, as good and evil, there could be as little merit 
in consenting, when virtue required the sacrifice, to suffer 
all the bodily pain which the instrument of torture could 
inflict, rather than to rest in guilty indolence on that luxu- 
rious couch of flowers, as there could be in the mere pre- 
ference, for any physical purpose, of a circular to an angular 
form, or of the softness of clay to the hardness of flint. 
Moral excellence is, indeed, in every case, preferable to 
mere physical enjoyment ; and there is no enjoyment 
worthy of the choice of man, when virtue forbids the desire. 
But virtue is the superior only, not the sole power. She 
has imperial sway ; but her sway is imperial, only because 
there are forms of inferior good, over which it is her glory 
to preside. 

It was this confusion as to the distinction of moral 
excellence, which is one object, and of mere happiness. 



CULTIVATION OF HAPPINESS. 



495 



which is another object, that led to all the extravagant 
declamations of the Porch, as to the equal happiness of 
every situation in which man can exist. Nor is it only in 
their sublime defiances of pain, that the inconsistency which 
I have pointed out is involved ; it is involved equally in 
the scale of preferences which they present to us in our very 
virtues. We are to love, for example, health rather than 
sickness ; but we are thus to love it, not because health is 
in itself a greater good than sickness, but only because it is 
the will of Heaven that we should love it more than the 
pain and imbecility of disease. And why do we infer it to 
be the will of Heaven that we should prefer health to sick- 
ness ? It is not easy to discover any reason for this infer- 
ence, but the absolute good of that which is declared in 
itself to be neither good nor evil. If health and sickness 
be in themselves, without regard to the will of Heaven, 
absolutely indifferent, they must still continue absolutely 
indifferent, or we must require some divine revelation to 
make known to us the will which we are to obey. 

It is this tacit assumption of the very circumstances 
denied, which forms indeed the radical fallacy of the system 
of Zeno ; a sort of fallacy which, in the course of our 
inquiries, we have had frequent opportunities of tracing in 
the systems of philosophers of every age. The will of the 
gods, as directing the choice, when there was a competition 
of many objects, seemed to furnish a reasonable ground of 
preference ; a ground of preference which was felt to be the 
more reasonable, because every one had previously, in his 
own mind, felt and silently admitted those distinctions of 
physical good and evil which the Stoics ostensibly denied, 
but which corresponded exactly with the divine intimations 
of preferableness, that were only these very distinctions, 
under a more magnificent name. To obey the will of the 
gods in preferring wealth to poverty, was in truth to have 
made the previous discovery, that wealth, as an object of 
desire, was preferable to poverty; and to have inferred, from 



496 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



this previous belief of tbe physical distinction, that supposed 
will of Heaven, which it would have been impossible to 
ascertain if the objects had been indifferent in themselves. 
If all external things were in themselves absolutely equal, 
then was it impossible to infer from them that divine pre- 
ference on which our own was to depend ; and if that 
divine preference could, in any way, be inferred from the 
physical differences of things, as essentially good and evil, 
then was it not to the divine intimation, as subsequently 
inferred, that we were to look for the source of that distinc- 
tion, from which alone, as previously felt, we inferred the 
intimation itself. 

The same erroneous notion, as to the absolute indifference 
with respect to mere happiness of all things external, which 
were not in themselves either good or evil, but as pointed 
out by the gods for our choice, led naturally, and, as I 
cannot but think, necessarily, to the strange stoical paradox 
of the absolute equality in merit of all virtuous actions, and 
the absolute equality in demerit of all vicious actions. 
This, indeed, with many of the other paradoxes maintained 
by the sect, Dr. Smith is inclined to consider as not forming 
a part of the system of Zeno and Cleanthes, but rather as 
introduced with other mere dialectic and technical subtleties, 
by their disciple and follower Chrysippus. Yet I confess 
that, absurd as the paradox is, and discordant with all our 
moral feelings, it yet seems to me so completely involved 
in the fundamental doctrine of the school, that it must have 
occurred, or at least may naturally be supposed to have 
occurred, to the very founders of the school, as an obvious 
and inevitable consequence of their doctrine ; and if it did 
so occur to them, we certainly have no reason to imagine 
that the assertors of so bold a paradox as that which stated 
the absolute physical indifference, as to happiness, of rapture 
and agony, would be very slow of maintaining a paradox 
additional, if the assertion of it were necessary to the 
maintenance of their system. It is an error, I may remark 



CULTIVATION OF HAPPINESS* 



497 



by the way, which is not, in principle at least, confined to 
Stoicism, but is radically involved in all those theological 
systems of Ethics, which make the very essence of virtue 
to consist in mere obedience to the will of God. If all 
actions be equal, except as they are ordered or not ordered 
by Heaven, which makes them objects of moral choice, 
simply by pointing them out to us as fit or unfit to be 
performed; then is there only one virtue, and only one 
vice, — the virtue of doing as Heaven commands, the vice 
of not doing as Heaven commands. Whatever the action 
may be, there may be this moral difference, but, in the 
stoical or theological view of virtue and vice, there can bo 
this difference only. To suppose that certain actions, 
merely by being more widely beneficial, are more obliga- 
tory than others ; that certain other actions, merely by 
being more widely injurious, are of greater delinquency 
than others, — would be to suppose, in opposition to the 
fundamental tenet of the whole system, that what we term 
a benefit is a good in itself, what we term an injury an evil 
in itself, independently of that will which intimates to us 
what is fit or unfit to be done. The most beneficial action, 
an action that confers the greatest amount of happiness on 
our nearest relative, or on our most generous benefactor, 
is good only because it is divinely commanded; and this 
character of virtue it must share in common with every 
action, however comparatively unimportant in itself, that 
is so commanded ; the most injurious action, of which the 
injury, too, may have been directed against those whom we 
were especially called to love, is evil only because it is 
divinely indicated to us as unworthy of our choice ; and 
this character of vice it must share in common with all the 
actions that are marked to be evil by this prohibition, and 
by this prohibition only. We are astonished, indeed, that 
offences which we regard as trifling should be classed by 
the Stoics with crimes that appear to us of the most 
aggravated iniquity ; but we are astonished only because 



498 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



we assume another estimate of virtue and vice, and have 
not adopted their general doctrine, that virtue is mere 
obedience to the will of the gods, and vice disobedience to 
it. The paradox is repugnant, indeed, to every feeling of 
our heart, but still it must be allowed to be in perfect 
harmony with the system ; as it must be allowed also to 
be necessarily involved in every system that reduces virtue 
and vice to mere obedience or disobedience to the will of 
Heaven. 

The whole errors of the stoical system, or at least its 
more important errors, may be traced, then, I conceive, to 
that radical mistake as to the nature of happiness, which 
we have been considering ; a mistake that, if truly allowed 
to influence the heart, could not fail to lessen the happiness 
of the individual, and in some measure too his virtue, in all 
the relations which personal happiness and virtue bear to 
private affection. If, indeed, it had been possible for 
human nature to feel what the Stoics maintained, — an 
absolute indifference as to every thing external, unless from 
some relation which it bore, or was imagined to bear, to the 
will of the Divinity, how much of all that tenderness which 
renders the domestic and friendly relations so delightful, 
would have been destroyed by the mere cessation of the 
little pleasures and little exercises of kindness and com- 
passion which foster the benevolent regard. It is in relation 
to these private affections only, however, that I conceive 
the stoical system to have been practically injurious to 
virtue, however false it may have been in mere theory, 
either as a physical system of the nature of man, or as a 
system of ethics adapted to the circumstances of his 
physical constitution. In every thing which terminated 
in the individual himself, the virtue which it recommended 
was what man perhaps may never be able to attain, but 
what it would be well for man if he could even approach ; 
and the nearer his approach to it, the more excellent must 
he become. Pain is, indeed, an ill; and we must err 



CULTIVATION OF HAPPINESS. 



499 



physically whenever we pronounce that to endure this ill 
is not an affliction to our sensitive nature : but it would be 
well for us in our moral resolutions, at least in those which 
regard only sufferings which ourselves may have to over- 
come, if we could be truly what a perfect Stoic would 
require of us to be. 

The error of the philosophy of the Porch, then, in relation 
to the physical ills of life, was at least an error of minds of 
the noblest character of moral enthusiasm. " If," says 
Montesquieu, " I could for a moment cease to think that I 
am a Christian, I could not fail to rank the destruction of 
the sect of Zeno in the list of the misfortunes of human 
kind. It was extravagant only in feelings which have in 
themselves a moral grandeur, — in the contempt of pleasures 
and afflictions. It alone knew how to make great citizens ; 
it alone made great men ; it alone made Emperors worthy 
of being called great. While the Stoics regarded as 
nothing, riches, grandeur, pleasures, and vexations, they 
occupied themselves only with labouring for the happiness 
of others in the discharge of the various social duties. It 
seemed as if they regarded that holy spirit — the portion of 
the divinity — which they believed to be in man, as a sort of 
bountiful providence that was watching over the human 
race. Born for society, they considered it as their office 
thus to labour for it ; and they laboured at little cost to the 
society which they benefited, because their reward was all 
within themselves: their philosophy sufficed for their 
happiness ; or rather, the happiness of others was the only 
accession which could increase their own." 1 

Hi mores, haec duri immota Catonis 
Secta fuit, servare modum, finemque tenere, 
Naturamque sequi, patriaeque impendere vitam ; 
Nec sibi, sed toti genitum se credere mundo. 
Huic epulae, yicisse famem : magnique penates, 



1 De l'Esprit des Lois, liv. xxiv. chap. x. 



500 



OF OUR DITTY" TO OURSELVES. 



Submovisse hyemem tecto : pretiosaque vestis, 
Hirtain membra super Romani more Quiritis 
Induxisse togam : Venerisque huic maximus usus, 
Progenies : Urbi pater est, Urbique maritus : 
Justitiae cultor, rigidi servator honesti : 
In commune bonus : nullosque Catonis in actus 
Subrepsit, partemque tulit sibi nata voluptas. 1 

In the peculiar circumstances of the ages in which the 
stoical doctrines chiefly flourished, — the servile and wretched 
ages in which, with that intellectual light, in a few indivi- 
duals, which leads when there is virtue, to grandeur of 
soul, and almost leads to virtue itself, — there was every 
where around a cold and gloomy despotism, that left man 
only to gaze on misery, or to feel misery, if he did not 
strive to rise wholly above it ; it is not wonderful that 
a philosophy which gave aid to this necessary elevation 
above the scene of human suffering and human ignominy, 
should have been the favourite philosophy of every better 
spirit ; of all those names which, at the distance of so many 
centuries, we still venerate as the names of some more than 
mortal deliverers of mankind. 

" Among the different schools,'' says Apollonius, in the 
sublime eulogy of the Emperor M. Aurelius, "Among the 
different schools he soon distinguished one which taught 
man to rise above himself. It discovered to him, as it 
were, a new world, — a world in which pleasure and pain 
were annihilated, where the senses had lost all their power 
over the soul, where poverty, riches, life, death, were 
nothing, and virtue existed alone. Romans ! it was this 
philosophy which gave you Cato and Brutus. It was it 
which supported them in the midst of the ruins of liberty, 
It extended itself afterwards, and multiplied under your 
tyrants. It seemed as if it had become a want to your 
oppressed ancestors, whose uncertain life was incessantly 



1 Lucani Pkarsalia, lib. ii. 380-39L 



CULTIVATION OF SENSITIVE HAPPINESS. 



501 



under the axe of the despot. In those times of disgrace 
alone, it preserved the dignity of human nature. It taught 
to live ; it taught to die ; and, while tyranny was degrading 
the soul, it lifted it up again with more force and grandeur. 
This heroic philosophy was made for heroic souls. Aure- 
lius marked as one of the most fortunate days of his life, 
that day of his boyhood in which he first heard of Cato. 
He preserved with gratitude the names of those who had 
made him, in like manner, acquainted with Brutus and 
Thraseas. He thanked the gods that he had had an 
opportunity of reading the maxims of Epietetus." 

That great emperor, who thus looked with veneration to 
others, was himself one of the noble boasts of Stoicism ; 
and it must always be the glory of the philosophy of the 
Porch, that, whatever its truths and errors might be, they 
were truths and errors which animated the virtues and 
comforted the sufferings of some of the noblest of mankind. 

With all the admiration, however, which it is impossible 
for us not to feel, of the sublimer parts of this system, it 
is still, as I said, founded on a false view of our nature. 
Man is to be considered not in one light only, but in many 
lights ; in all of which he may be a subject of agreeable 
feelings, and consequently of happiness, as a series of 
agreeable feelings. He is a sensitive being, an intellectual 
being, a moral being, a religious being, and there are 
species of happiness that correspond with these varieties. 
t Though it would be unnecessary, then, to enter on any 
very minute details of all the varieties of agreeable feeling, 
of which happiness, as a whole, may be composed, a few 
slight remarks may still be added, on these chief specific 
relations of our happiness, sensitive, intellectual, moral, and 
religious. 

That the pleasure which may be felt by us as sensitive 
beings is not to be rejected by us as unworthy of man, I 
need not prove to you, after the definition of happiness 



502 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



which I have given you. Happiness, however, though 
only a series of agreeable feelings, is to be estimated not 
only by the intensity and duration of those agreeable feel- 
ings which compose it, but by the relations of these, as 
likely to produce or not to produce, to prevent or not to 
prevent, other series of agreeable feelings, and to cherish 
or repress that moral excellence which, as an object of 
desire, is superior even to pleasure itself. It is according 
to these relations chiefly that the pleasures of the senses 
are to be estimated. In themselves, as mere pleasures, they 
are good, and if they left the same ardour of generous 
enterprise, or of patient self-command, if they did not 
occupy time, which should have been employed in higher 
offices, and if, in their influence on the future capacity of 
mere enjoyment, they did not tend to lessen or prevent 
happiness which would otherwise have been enjoyed, or to 
occasion pain which otherwise would not have arisen, and 
which is equivalent, or more than equivalent, to the tempo- 
rary happiness afforded, it would, in these circumstances, 
I will admit, be impossible for man to be too much a sen- 
sualist ; since pleasure, which in itself is good, is evil only 
when its consequences are evil. 

He who has lavished on us so many means of delight, as 
to make it impossible for us, in the ordinary circumstances 
of life, not to be sensitively happy in some greater or less 
degree, has not made nature so full of beauty that we 
should not admire it. He has not poured fragrance and 
music around us, and strewed with flowers the very turf 
on which we tread, that our heart may not rejoice as we 
move along, but that we may walk through this world of 
loveliness with the same dull eye and indifferent soul, with 
which we should have traversed unvaried scenes, without 
a colour, or an odour, or a song. 

The pleasures of the senses, then, are not merely allow- 
able, under the restrictions which I stated, but to abstain 



CULTIVATION OF SENSITIVE HAPPINESS. 



503 



from them with no other view than because they are 
pleasures, would be a sort of contempt of the goodness of 
God, or a blasphemy against his gracious bounty, if we 
were to assert that such abstinence from pleasure, merely 
as pleasure, can be gratifying to infinite benevolence. 

It is very different, however, when the solicitations of 
pleasure are resisted on account of those circumstances which 
1 have mentioned as the only reasonable restrictions on en- 
joyment, circumstances which give to temperance its rank 
as one of the virtues, and as one which is far from being the 
humblest of the glorious band. 

Even though excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures 
had no other evil than the pains and lessening of enjoy- 
ment to which they give occasion, this reduction of the 
general amount of happiness would afford an irresistible 
reason for curbing the sensual appetite. The headach, the 
languor, the long and miserable diseases of intemperance, 
are themselves sufficient punishments of the luxurious 
indulgences which produced them. But, without taking 
these into account, how great is the loss of simpler pleasure, 
of pleasure more frequently and more universally acquir- 
able, but which the habit of seeking only violent enjoy- 
ments for an inflamed and vitiated appetite, has rendered 
too feeble to be felt. They do not lose little who lose only 
what the intemperate lose. To enjoy, perhaps, a single 
luxury, which, even though they were truly to enjoy it, 
would not be worth so costly a purchase, they give up the 
capacity of innumerable delights. Though it were 
pleasing rather than painful to gaze for a few moments 
on the sun, the pleasure would surely be too dearly 
bought, if it were to leave the eyes for hours dazzled 
and incapable of enjoying the beautiful colours of that 
wide expanse of nature with which the same radiance, 
when more moderately shed, refreshes the very vision 
\v liich it delights. 



504 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



The influence of intemperance, in lessening the amount 
of general enjoyment, injurious as it is. even in this way. to 
a being who loves happiness, is slight, however, when com- 
pared with its more fatal injury to every virtuous habit. 
He who has trained his whole soul to sensual indulgences, 
has prepared for himself innumerable seductions from moral 
good, while he has. at the same time, prepared in his own 
heart a greater weakness of resisting those seductions. He 
requires too costly and cumbrous an apparatus of happiness 
to feel delight at the call of virtue, which may order him 
where he cannot be accompanied by so many superfluities, 
but to him necessary things ; and he will learn, therefore, to 
consider that which would deprive him of his accustomed 
enjoyments, as a foe. not as a guardian or moral adviser. It 
is mentioned of a friend of Charles I. in the civil war of 
the Parliament, that he had made up his mind to take 
horse and join the royal party, but for one circumstance, 
that he could not reconcile himself to the thought of being 
an hour or two less in bed than he had been accustomed in 
his quiet home; and he therefore, after duly reflecting on 
the impossibility of being both a good subject and a good 
sleeper, contented himself with remaining to enjoy his 
repose. Absurd as such an anecdote may seem, it states 
only what passes innumerable times through the silent heart 
of every voluptuary, in similar comparisons of the most 
important duties with the most petty but habitual plea- 
sures. How many more virtuous actions would have been 
performed on earth, if the performance of them had not 
been inconsistent with enjoyments, as insignificant in 
themselves as an hour of unnecessary and perhaps hurtful 
slumber ? 

In one of the most eloquent of the ancient writers there 
is. a striking picture. of this contrast, which the virtuous 
the dissolute present almost to our very senses. 
u Altum quidoam est virtus, excel sum, regale, invictum. 



CULTIVATION OF SENSITIVE HAPPINESS. 



505 



infatigabile ; voluptas, huinile, servile, irobecillum, cadu- 
curu, cujus statio ac domicilium fornices et popinae sunt. 
Tirtutem in teraplo invenies, in foro, in curia, pro muris 
stantem, pulverulentam, coloratam, cailosas habentem 
manus ; voluptatem latitantem saepius, ac tenebras captan- 
tem, circa balnea ac sudatoria, ac loca aedilem metuentia, 
mollem, enervem,mero atque unguento madentem, pal lid am, 
aut fucatam et medicamentis pollutant." 1 

From this tendency of excessive indulgence in mere 
sensual pleasure to weaken and debase the mind, and thus 
to expose it an easy prey to every species of evil, Epicurus, 
the great assertor of sensual pleasures, as the sole direct 
good in life, was led to maintain the importance of tem- 
perance, almost with the same appearance of rigid severity 
as the teachers of a very different school. In mere precepts 
of virtue, indeed — that is to say, in every thing practical — 
the schools, the most opposite to each other in their views 
of the nature of good, were nearly similar. Both set out 
from principles that might have seemed to lead them far 
from each other ; yet both arrived at the same conclusions, 
on the points on which it was most important to form a 
judgment. It is gratifying to find the loose freedom of the 
most licentious system of immorality thus forced, for its 
own happiness, to submit itself to the moral restraints 
which it seemed to boast of throwing off, and Pleasure her- 
self compelled, as it were, to pay homage to that Virtue 
from which she vainly endeavoured to withdraw the worship 
of mankind. 

1 Seneca de Vita Beata, cap, vii. 



2 



506 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES, 



LECTURE XXVIII. 

OP OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES — CULTIVATION OF INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, 
AND RELIGIOUS HAPPINESS. 

The greater part of my last Lecture was occupied with 
an examination of the erroneous opinions as to happiness, 
entertained by some sects of ancient philosophers, and par- 
ticularly of the doctrines of one memorable sect, whose 
general system, false as it was in many respects, had yet 
so much in it of the sublimity of virtue, and was so 
eminently fitted to produce or to attract to it whatever was 
morally great, that, when we read of any noble act of 
patriotism in the ages and countries in which the system 
flourished, we almost take for granted that he who dared 
heroically, or suffered heroically, was of the distinguished 
number of this school of heroes. 

The error of the ancient inquirers into happiness consisted, 
as we found, in excessive simplification — in the belief that 
happiness was one and simple, definite, and almost self- 
subsisting, like an universal essence of the schools, — in the 
assertion, therefore, of one peculiar form of good, as if it- 
were ail that deserved that name, and the consequent 
exclusion of other forms of good that could not be reduced 
to the favourite species. He who had confined all happi- 
ness to the pleasure of the senses, was of course under the 
necessity of denying that there was any moral pleasure 
whatever, which had not a direct relation to some mere 
sensual delight ; while the assertor of a different system, 
who had affirmed virtue only to be good, was of course 
under an equal necessity of denying that any pleasure of 
the senses, however intense or pure, could be even the 
slightest element of happiness. Both were right in what 



CULTIVATION OF INTELLECTUAL HAPPINESS. 507 



they admitted, wrong in what they excluded; and the 
paradoxes into which they were led, were necessary conse- 
quences of the excessive simplification. 

A wider and more judicious view of our nature would 
have shown, that human happiness is as various as the 
functions of man : that the Deity, who has united us by so 
many relations to the whole living and inanimate world, 
has, in these relations, surrounded us with means of varied 
enjoyment, which it is as truly impossible for us not to 
partake with satisfaction, as not to behold the very scene 
itself, which is for ever in all its beauty before our eyes : 
that happiness is the name of a series of agreeable feelings, 
and of such a series only ; and that whatever is capable of 
exciting agreeable feelings, is, therefore, or may be, to that 
extent, a source of happiness. 

Man is a sensitive being, an intellectual being, a moral 
being, a religious being. There are agreeable feelings 
which belong to him in each of these capacities ; a happi- 
ness, in short, sensitive, intellectual, moral, and religious ; 
and though we may affect, in verbal accordance with some 
system, to deny any of these various forms of good, it is 
only in words that we can so deny them. 

The remarks in my last lecture were limited to the 
happiness which we are capable of enjoying in the first of 
these capacities, as sensitive beings. I proceed then now 
to the happiness of which we are intellectually susceptible. 

That pleasure does attend the sublime operations of 
intellect in the discovery of truth, or the splendid creations 
of fancy, or the various arts to which science and imagina- 
tion are subservient, every one, I presume, will readily 
admit, to whom these operations are familiar. But the 
great masters in science and art are few ; and the pleasure 
which they feel in their noblest inventions, therefore, 
would be but a slight element in the sum of human happi- 
ness. The joy, however, is not confined to the productive 



508 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



functions, which have the pride of contemplating these great 
results as their own. It exists to all who have the humbler 
capacity of contemplating them merely as results of human 
genius. It is delightful to learn, though another may have 
been the discoverer; and perhaps the pleasure which a 
mind truly ardent for knowledge feels in those early years 
in which the new world of science is opened, as it were, to 
its view, and every step, and almost every glance, affords 
some new accession of admiration and power, may not be 
surpassed, even by the pleasure which it is afterwards to 
feel, when it is not to be the receiver of the wisdom of 
others, but itself the enlightener of the wise. 

The peculiar and most prominent advantage of the intel- 
lectual pleasures, however, in relation to general happiness, 
regards as much what they prevent as what they afford. 
It is what I had before occasion to point out to you, when 
treating of the common causes of fretfulness of temper, to 
which mere want of occupation leads perhaps as frequently 
as any positive cause. This advantage is the ready resource 
which these pleasures afford, in cases in which the hours 
would be slow and heavy without them. One of the most 
valuable arts of happiness, to those who are not privileged, 
if I may so express it, with the necessity of labour, is to 
know how to prepare resources that may be readily at 
hand, in the dreary hours that are without employment of 
any other kind. It is not always in the power of the idler 
to command the company of other idlers, with whom he 
may busy himself in labouring to forget that he is not busy; 
and, delightful as it may be for a while, it is but a weary 
occupation after all, to walk along the pavement or the 
field, and to count faces or trees, for the pleasure of being a 
little more, and but a very little more active, than if the 
same time had been spent on the same quiet seat, with 
folded arms, and drowsy eyelids, that have the dulness of 
beginning slumber, without its repose. In bad weather 



CULTIVATION OF ilORAL HAPPINESS. 



509 



and slight indisposition, when even these feeble resources 
are lost, the heavy burden of a day is still more insupportable 
to him vrho has nothing on which to lean, that may aid him 
in supporting it ; and who, when an hour is at last shaken 
off, still sees other hours hanging over him, that are to weigh 
him down as drearily and heavily. In such circumstances, 
how much does he add to happiness, who can give the mind 
a resource that is ready at its very call, in almost all the 
circumstances in which it can be placed ; and such a 
resource does the power of deriving pleasure from a book 
afford. The consolation which this yields, is indeed next 
in value to the consolation of virtue itself. It would not be 
easy to form a conception adequate to the amount of positive 
pleasure enjoyed, and still more of positive pain prevented, 
which, in civilized life, is due to works that are perhaps of 
no value, but as they serve this temporary purpose of filling 
up the vacuities of empty days, or empty hours even of days 
that in part are occupied. 

I need not quote to you the very beautiful passage of 
Cicero on this universality of the delights of literature, in 
youth, in old age, at home, and abroad, which has been so 
often quoted by every body that it must be familiar to you 
all. There is a beautiful passage, however, of another 
Roman philosopher, to the same purport, with which you 
are probably less acquainted, that expresses in a manner as 
striking the advantages of study, in the power which it 
gives us, not merely of occupying our hours of leisure, but 
of extending our existence through all the ages that have 
preceded us, and enjoying the communion of the noblest 
minds with which those ages were adorned. " Soli omnium 
otiosi sunt, qui sapientiae vacant : soli vivunt. Xec enim 
suam tantum aetatem bene tuentur : omne aevum suo 
adjiciunt. Quidquid annorum ante illos actum est, illis 
acquisitum est. Nisi ingratissimi sumus, illi clarissimi 
sacrarum opinionum conditores nobis nati sunt, nobis vitam 



610 OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 

praeparaverunt. Ad res pulcherrimas, ex tenebris ad lucem 
erutas, alieno labore deducimur : nullo nobis saeculo inter- 
dictum est : in omnia admittimur : et si magnitudine animi 
egredi humanae imbecillitatis augustias libet, multum per 
quod spatiemur temporis est. Disputare cum Socrate licet, 
dubitare cum Carneade, cum Epicuro quiescere, naturam 
cum Stoicis vincere, cum Cynicis excedere, cum rerum 
natura in consortium omnis aevi pariter incedere." 1 " What 
happiness," he continues, " and how beautiful an old age 
awaits him who has betaken himself to the communion of 
those great minds ; who has constantly with him those with 
whom he may deliberate on every thing which concerns 
him ; whom he may consult daily as to his own moral 
progress, and hear truth from them without contumely, 
praise without adulation ; to whose very similitude, by this 
intercourse, he may learn at last to form even his own 
feebler nature. We are often in the habit of complaining 
that our parents, and all the circumstances of our birth, are 
not of our choice, but of our fortune. We have it in our 
power, however, to be born as we please in this second 
birth of genius. Of the illustrious minds that have pre- 
ceded us, we have only to determine to whom we wish to 
be allied ; and we are already adopted, not to the inherit- 
ance of his mere name, but to the nobler inheritance of 
every thing which he possessed." 

Such, in importance, is intellectual happiness, considered 
merely as happiness, and such, consequently, the practical 
duty of cultivating it. Still more important, however, 
is the happiness of which we are susceptible as moral 
beings. 

This moral happiness may be considered, practically, in 
two lights, — as relating to things, and as relating to per- 
sona; to the objects of our covetous desires of every sort, 



Seneca de Breyitate Vitae, cap. xiv. 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL HAPPINESS. 511 



and to the living objects of our affections of love and hate, 
in all their varieties. 

With respect to the former of these divisions, in the com- 
petition of the many objects that may attract us, a most 
important practical rule for happiness, is to give our chief 
consideration, so as to produce, indirectly, a corresponding 
tendency of desire to the advantages of those objects which 
are attended with least risk of disappointment, and attended, 
too, with fewest entanglements of necessary obsequiousness 
to the powerful, and enmities of competitors that, even 
though our pursuit should be ultimately successful, may 
disturb our peace, almost as much as if we had wholly 
failed. It is most important, then, for our general happi- 
ness, to have associated the notion of happiness itself with 
objects that are of easy attainment, and that depend more 
upon ourselves than on the accidents of fortune. If it is 
not easy for him who has many wishes to be tranquil, it 
must be still less easy for him to be happy who has many 
disappointments ; and the ambitious man must be fortunate, 
indeed, who has not frequently such disappointments to 
encounter. Did we know nothing more of any two indi- 
viduals of moderate fortune, than that they had associated 
the image of supreme felicity, the one with the enjoyments 
of benevolence and literature and domestic tranquillity, and 
the other with the acquisition of all the tumultuous gran- 
deur of elevated place, could we hesitate for a moment to 
predict, to whose lot the greater sum of pleasure would fall, 
and the less of miserable solicitude ? " How, indeed, can 
he be happy," to borrow the language of one who had many 
opportunities of witnessing that ambition which he so well 
described, " how can he be happy, who is ever weary of 
homage received, and who sets a value on nothing but what 
is refused to him ? He can enjoy nothing; not his glory, 
for it seems to him obscure ; not his station, for he thinks 
only of mounting to some greater height ; not even his very 



512 



OF OFR DITTY TO OURSELVES 



repose, for he is wretched in proportion as he is obliged to 

be tranquil." 

It would be well, indeed, for those who have the mis- 
fortune of thinking thai happiness is only another name for 
the posses-ion of wealth and p >wer. if they could trace the 
whole sorios of feelings that have constituted the life of far 
the greater number of the wealthy and the powerful. 

If all, united, thy ambition call, 

From ancient story learn to scorn them alL 

There, in the rich, the honourM, famed, and great, 

See the false scale of happiness complete: 

In hearts of kings, or arms of queens who lav. 

How happy those to ruin, these betray ! 

Mark by what wretched step? their glory grows, 

From dirt and sea-vreei as proud Venice rose ! 

In each, how guilt and greatness equal ran, 

And all that raised the hero sunk the man. 

Now Europe's laurels on their brows behold. 

Bat stain'd with blood, or ill exchanged for gold : 

Then see then: brche with toils, or sunk in ease. 

Or infamous for plunder' d provinces ! 

Wealth ill-fated ! which no act of fame 

Ere taught to shine, or sanctified from shame'!' 

What greater bliss attends their close of life ? 

Some greedy minim, or imperious wife. 

The trophied arches, storied halls invade. 

And haunt their slumbers in the pompons shade. 

Alas 1 not dazzled with their noentide ray. 

Compute the morn ana evening t:« the day. — 

A tale that blends their glory with their shame. 1 

Of kindred character with moderation in our wishes, 
which regards the future only, is the habit of considering 
the cheerful rather than the gloomy appearances of things, 
which allows so much delight to be felt in things possessed, 



1 Essay on Man, Ed. iv. 235-S03. 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL HAPPINESS. 



513 



as scarcely to afford room for that discontent with the pre- 
sent, in which the greater number of our wishes of the 
future, and especially of those aimless and capricious wishes 
which it is most difficult to satisfy, have their origin. How 
many are there who, surrounded with all the means of 
enjoyment, make to themselves a sad occupation of extract- 
ing misery from happiness itself; and who labour to be 
wretched, as if for no other purpose than to show the 
insufficiency of fortune to confer what it seems to promise. 
Good and evil are so mingled together in this system of 
things, that there is scarcely any event so productive of 
evil, as not to have some good mixed with it, direct, or in- 
direct ; and scarcely any so good as not to be attended with 
some proportion of evil, or, at least, of what seems to us 
for the time to be evil. As we dwell more on one or on 
the other, we do not indeed alter the real nature of things, 
but we render them in their relation to us very nearly the 
same, as if their nature were really altered. If we look on 
them with a gloomy eye, all are gloomy. But there is a 
source of light within us, an everlasting sunshine, which 
we can throw on every thing around, till it reflect on us 
what has beamed from our own serene heart ; like that 
great luminary which, ever moving through a world of 
darkness, is still on every side surrounded with the radiance 
which flows from itself ; and cannot appear without con- 
verting night into the cheerfulness of day, 

One other practical rule with respect to our wishes, it is 
of still greater importance to render familiar to us, — that, 
in estimating the different objects which we obtain, and 
those which we see obtained by others, we should accustom 
ourselves to consider, not merely what each has acquired, 
but what has been given by each in purchase for it, — the 
time, the labour, the comfort, perhaps the virtue ; and that 
we do not repine, therefore, when objects which we should 
have wished to acquire, are possessed by those who, in the 



514 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



great barter of happiness, or what seems to be happiness, 
have paid for them more than we should have consented to 
pay. All which we wish to attain in life is so truly a mat- 
ter of purchase, that I know no view so powerful as this 
for preventing discontent in occasional failure ; and I can- 
not urge it more forcibly to you than has been done by one 
of the first female writers of the age, in a very eloquent 
moral Essay against Inconsistency in our Expectations. 
From this Essay of Mrs. Barbauld, which is confessedly 
founded, in its great argument, on a very striking para- 
graph of Epictetus, I quote a few passages : 

" We should consider this world as a great mart of 
commerce, where fortune exposes to our view various 
commodities, — riches, ease, tranquillity, fame, integrity, 
knowledge. Every thing is marked at a settled price. 
Our time, our labour, our ingenuity, are so much ready 
money, which we are to lay out to the best advantage. 
Examine, compare, choose, reject ; but stand to your own 
judgment; and do not, like children, when you have pur- 
chased one thing, repine that you do not possess another 
which you did not purchase. Such is the force of well- 
regulated industry, that a steady and vigorous exertion of 
our faculties, directed to one end, will generally ensure suc- 
cess. Would you, for instance, be rich ? Do you think 
that single point worth the sacrificing every thing else to ? 
You may then be rich. Thousands have become so from 
the lowest beginnings, by toil, and patient diligence, and 
attention to the minutest articles of expense and profit. 
But you must give up the pleasures of leisure, of a vacant 
mind, of a free unsuspicious temper. If you preserve your 
integrity, it must be a coarse-spun and vulgar honesty. 
Those high and lofty notions of morals which you brought 
with you from the schools must be considerably lowered, 
and mixed with the baser alloy of a jealous and worldly- 
minded prudence. You must learn to do hard, if not 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL HAPPINESS. 515 



unjust things ; and for the nice embarrassments of a deli- 
cate and ingenuous spirit, it is necessary for you to get rid 
of them as fast as possible. You must shut your heart 
against the Muses, and be content to feed your understand- 
ing with plain household truths. In short, you must not 
attempt to enlarge your ideas, or polish your taste, or refine 
your sentiments ; but must keep on in one beaten track, 
without turning aside either to the right hand or to the 
left. 6 But I cannot submit to drudgery like this — I feel 
a spirit above it.' Tis well : be above it then ; only do 
not repine that you are not rich. 

" Is knowledge the pearl of price ? That too may be 
purchased, by steady application and long solitary hours of 
study and reflection. Bestow these, and you shall be wise. 
c But, (says the man of letters,) what a hardship is it, that 
many an illiterate fellow, who cannot construe the motto of 
the arms on his coach, shall raise a fortune and make a 
figure, while I have little more than the common conve- 
niencies of life.' Et tibi magna satis? Was it in order to 
raise a fortune that you consumed the sprightly hours of 
youth in study and retirement ? Was it to be rich that you 
grew pale over the midnight lamp, and distilled the sweet- 
ness from the Greek and Roman spring ? You have then 
mistaken your path, and ill employed your industry. 
6 What reward have I then for all my labours V What 
reward! A large comprehensive soul, well purged from 
vulgar fears, and perturbations, and prejudices ; able to 
comprehend and interpret the works of man — of God. A 
rich, flourishing, cultivated mind, pregnant with inexhaus- 
tible stores of entertainment and reflection. A perpetual 
spring of fresh ideas ; and the conscious dignity of superior 
intelligence. Good Heaven ! and what reward can you 
ask besides ? 

" 6 But is it not some reproach upon the economy of 
Providence that such a one, who is a mean dirty fellow, 



516 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



should have amassed wealth enough to buy half a nation V 
Not in the least. He made himself a mean dirty fellow 
for that very end. He has paid his health, his conscience, 
his liberty, for it ; and will you envy him his bargain ? 
Will you hang your head and blush in his presence because 
he outshines you in equipage and show ? Lift up your 
brow with a noble confidence, and say to yourself, I have 
not these things, it is true ; but it is because I have not 
sought, because I have not desired them ; it is because I 
possess something better. I have chosen my lot : I am 
content and satisfied. 

" You are a modest man : you love quiet and indepen- 
dence, and have a delicacy and reserve in your temper, 
which renders it impossible for you to elbow your way in the 
world, and be the herald of your own merits. Be content, 
then, with a modest retirement, with the esteem of your 
intimate friends, with the praises of a blameless heart and 
a delicate ingenuous spirit ; but resign the splendid dis- 
tinctions of the world to those who can better scramble for 
them." 

"The man whose tender sensibility of conscience, and 
strict regard to the rules of morality, make him scrupulous 
and fearful of offending, is often heard to complain of the 
disadvantages he lies under in every path of honour and 
profit. 6 Could I but get over some nice points, and con- 
form to the practice and opinion of those about me, I might 
stand as fair a chance as others for dignities and prefer- 
ment.' And why can you not ? What hinders you from 
discarding this troublesome scrupulosity of yours which 
stands so grievously in your way ? If it be a small thing 
to enjoy a healthful mind, sound at the very core, that does 
not shrink from the keenest inspection — inward freedom 
from remorse and perturbation — unsullied whiteness and 
simplicity of manners — a genuine integrity 
Pure in the last recesses of the mind ; 



CULTIVATION OF MORAL HAPPINESS. 



517 



if you think these advantages an inadequate recompense for 
what you resign, dismiss your scruples this instant, and be 
a slave merchant, a parasite, or what you please." 1 

Bring then these blessings to a strict account ; 
Make fair deductions; see to what they mount : 
How much of other each is sure to cost ; 
How each for other oft is wholly lost ; 
How inconsistent greater goods with these ; 
How sometimes life is risk'd, and always ease : 
Think; and if still the things thy envy call, 
Say, wouldst thou be the man to whom they fall ? 2 

With respect to the living objects of our affections, whom 
we voluntarily add to those with whom nature has pecu- 
liarly connected us, the most important, though the most 
obvious of all practical rules, is, to consider well in every 
instance what it is which we are about to love or hate, that 
we may not love with any peculiar friendship what it may 
be dangerous to our virtue to love ; or, if not dangerous to 
our virtue, at least dangerous to our peace, from the vices 
or follies which all our care may be vain to remedy, and of 
which much of the misery and disgrace cannot fail to over* 
flow upon us. In the emotions of an opposite kind, before 
we consent to submit our happiness to that disquietude 
which we must endure as often as we feel hatred, or auger, 
or lasting indignation of any sort, it is, in like manner, 
necessary to pause, and consider whether it may not have 
been still possible for us to have been deceived, as to those 
supposed facts which appear to us to justify our malevolent 
feelings. We must not imagine, as they who err in this 
respect are very apt to imagine, that too quick a wrath is 
justified by the avowal that our temper is passionate ; for it 
is the inattention to this very quickness of feeling resent- 

1 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by John Aikin, M.D. and 
Anna Lsetitia Barbauld. 3d edition, pp. 62-69. London, 1792, 

2 Essay on Man, Ep. iv. 269-276. 



518 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



merit, which a passionate disposition denotes, that consti- 
tutes the chief moral evil of such exacerbations of unmerited 
anger, that are converted into a passionate habit by the in- 
attention only. Our duties arise often from our dangers, and 
increase with our dangers. The adulterer does not think 
of justifying himself by the confession of the violence of 
his adulterous desires : the liveliness of feelings which he 
knows to be unworthy of him, as they show him the greater 
peril to which his virtue is exposed, should render him 
more eager to strive to repress them ; and he who feels 
himself most readily irritable, instead of regarding his 
irritability as an excuse, should, in like manner, look upon 
it only as an additional reason to avoid, most sedulously, 
es r ery occasion of anger, and to consider the first slight 
beginning emotion, therefore, as a warning to beware. 

I have already spoken of the advantage of looking to 
the bright sides of things ; and it is not of less advantage 
to have acquired the habit of looking to the bright sides of 
persons. In our just resentment against a few, we are not 
to lose our admiration and love of the whole human race. 
We may have been deceived ; but it does not therefore 
follow that all around us are deceivers. How much happi- 
ness does he lose who is ever on the watch for injustice, and 
to whom the very unsuspecting confidence of friendship 
itself is only something that will require a more careful 
and vigilant scrutiny. 

Farewell to virtue's peaceful times : 
Soon will you stoop to act the crimes 

Which, thus you stoop to fear. 
Guilt follows guilt ; and where the train 
Begins with wrongs of such a stain, 

What horrors form the rear ! 

Throned in the sun's descending car, 
What power unseen diffuseth far 



CULTIVATION OF RELIGIOUS HAPPINESS. 519 



This tenderness of mind % 
What genius smiles on yonder flood % 
What God, in whispers from the wood, 

Bids every thought be kind ? 

thou, whate'er thy awful name, 
Whose wisdom our untoward frame 

With social love restrains ; 
Thou, who by fair affection's ties 
Givest us to double all our joys, 

And half disarm our pains ; 

Let universal candour still, 
Clear as yon heaven-reflecting rill, 

Preserve my open mind ; 
Nor this nor that man's crooked ways 
One sordid doubt within me raise, 

To injure human kind. 1 

On the general happiness which virtue, considered as one 
great plan of conduct, tends to afford, it would be idle to 
add any remarks, after the full discussions of the whole 
doctrine of virtue with which we were so long occupied. 
Where it is, there is no need of effort to appear happy ; 
and, where it is not, the effort will be vain. Nothing, 
indeed, can be juster than the observation of Rousseau, that 
" it is far easier to be happy than to appear so." What 
inexhaustible sources of delight are there in all those ready 
suggestions which constitute the remembrances of a life 
well spent, when there is not a familiar place or person 
that does not recall to us the happiness which attended 
some deed of virtue, or at least some benevolent wish ! 
M The true secret of happiness," says Fontenelle, " is to be 
well with our own mind. The vexations which we must 
expect to happen to us from without, will often throw us 
back upon ourselves : it is good to have there an agreeable 
retreat." 

1 Akenside, 



520 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



The delights of virtue, of course, lead me to those 
delights of religion with which they are so intimately con- 
nected. Even these, too, are to a certain extent subjects 
of practical deliberation. We must, if we value our happi- 
ness, be careful in determining what it is which we deno- 
minate religion, that we may not extend its supposed duties 
to usages inconsistent with our tranquillity ; and still more, 
that we may not form to ourselves unworthy notions of him 
on whom we consider our whole happiness to depend. It 
is not enough to believe in God, as an irresistible power 
that presides over the universe ; for this a malignant demon 
might be ; it is necessary for our devout happiness that we 
should believe in him as that pure and gracious Being who 
is the encourager of our virtues and the comforter of our 
sorrows. 

Quantum religio potuit suadere malorum, 
exclaims the Epicurean poet, in thinking of the evils which 
superstition, characterized by that ambiguous name, had 
produced : and where a fierce or gloomy superstition has 
usurped the influence which religion graciously exercises 
only for purposes of benevolence to man, whom she makes 
happy with a present enjoyment, by the very expression of 
devout gratitude for happiness already enjoyed, it would 
not be easy to estimate the amount of positive misery which 
must result from the mere contemplation of a tyrant in the 
heavens, and of a creation subject to his cruelty and caprice. 
It is a practical duty then, in relation to our own happi- 
ness, to trace assiduously the divine manifestations of good- 
ness in the universe, that we may know with more delight- 
ful confidence the benevolence which we adore. It is our 
duty, in like manner, to study the manifestations of his wis- 
dom in the regular arrangement of the laws of the universe, 
that we may not ignorantly tremble at imaginary influences, 
which we almost oppose to his divine power. How often 
have we occasion to observe in individuals, who think that 



CULTIVATION OF RELIGIOUS HAPPINESS. 521 



they are believers and worshippers of one omnipotent God, 
a species of minor superstition, which does not indeed, like 
the more gigantic species, destroy happiness at once, but 
which, in those who are unfortunately subject to it, is 
almost incessantly making some slight attack on happiness, 
and is thus as destructive of tranquillity as it is dishonour- 
able to the religion that is professed. There is scarcely 
any thing, however insignificant and contemptible, which 
superstition has not converted into an oracle. Spectres 
and dreams, and omens of every kind, have made cowards 
even of the bravest men ; and though we no longer stop an 
expedition, or suspend an important debate, at the perking 
of a chicken, or the flight of a crow, the great multitude, 
even in nations the most civilized, are still under the in- 
fluence of imaginary terrors that scarcely can be said to be 
less absurd. Of how much sorrow might the same account 
be given, as that which Gay ascribes to the farmer's wife : 

Alas ! you know the cause too well, 
The salt is spilt : — to me it fell ; 
Then, to contribute to my loss, 
My knife and fork were laid across ; 
On Friday too ! the day I dread ! 
Would I were safe at home in bed ! 
Last night — I vow to Heaven 'tis true — ■ 
Bounce from the fire a coffin flew. 
Next post some fatal news shall tell ; 
God send, my Cornish friends be well I 1 

The difficulty of distinguishing casual successions of 
events from the unvarying sequences of causation, gives 
unfortunately to the ignorant too much room for such dis- 
quieting associations, which nothing but juster views of 
philosophy can be expected to prevent or dissipate. The 
cultivation of sound opinions in science is thus, in more 
senses than one, the cultivation of happiness. 

1 Fables, fab. xxxvii. 



522 



OF OUR DUTY TO OURSELVES. 



When religion is truly free from all superstition, there 
can be no question that the delights which it affords are 
the noblest of which our nature is capable. It surrounds 
us with every thing which it is delightful to contemplate ; 
with all those gracious qualities, that, even in the far less 
degrees of excellence in which they can be faintly shadowed 
by the humble nature of man, constitute whatever we love 
and venerate in the noblest of our race. We cannot be 
surrounded, indeed, at every moment by patriots and 
sages, — by the human enlighteners and blessers of the 
world, for our own existence is limited to a small por- 
tion of that globe, and a few hours of those ages 
which they successively enlightened and blessed ; but 
we can be surrounded, and are every moment surrounded 
by a wisdom and goodness that transcend far more what- 
ever patriots and sages could exhibit to us, than these 
transcended the meanest of the multitude, whom their 
generous efforts were scarcely able to elevate to the rank of 
men. If we but open our heart to the benevolence that is 
shining on it, as we open our eyes to the colours with which 
the earth is embellished, we have nature constantly before 
us ; and the God of nature, whose goodness is every where, 
like the unfading sunshine of the world. 

When other joys are present, indeed, the pleasures of 
religion, it may be thought, are superfluous. We are 
happy ; and happiness may suffice. Yet he knows little of 
the grateful influence of devotion, who has never felt it as 
a heightener of pleasure as well as a comforter of grief. 
" speak the joy," says Thomson, after describing a scene 
of parental and conjugal happiness : 

speak the joy, ye whom the sudden tear 

Surprises often, while you look around, 

And nothing strikes your eye but sights of bliss. 1 

1 Seasons ; conclusion of SpriDg. 



i 



CULTIVATION OF RELIGIOUS HAPPINESS. 523 



The tear which thus arises, is a tear of gratitude to him 
who has given the happiness which the parental heart is at 
once sharing and producing, — the overflowing tenderness of 
one who feels in the enjoyment of that very moment, that 
the Power which blesses him will be the blesser too, in 
after-life, of those whom he loves. 

It is in hours of affliction, however, it will be admitted, 
that the influence is most beneficial ; but how glorious a 
character is it of religion, that it is thus most powerful 
when its influence is most needed, and when it, and the 
virtues which it has fostered, are the only influences that do 
not desert the miserable, and the only influences that can 
relieve. Religion is most powerful in affliction. It is 
powerful, because it shows that even affliction itself can 
make man nobler than he was ; and that there is a gracious 
eye which marks the conflict, and is ever ready to smile 
with more than approbation on the victor. To the indigent, 
to the oppressed, to the diseased, while life has still a single 
sorrow to be borne, it flings on the short twilight a portion 
of the splendour of that immortality into which it is almost 
dawning ; and when life is closing, it is itself the first joy 
of that immortality which begins. 

The devout enjoyments of a grateful and confiding heart, 
then, are truly the noblest enjoyments of which that heart 
is capable, — not more from the purity, and vividness, and 
permanence of the direct pleasures themselves, than from 
the influence which they diffuse on every other pleasure, 
and on every pain of life. When we have accustomed our 
minds to the frequent contemplation of His perfections, 
who, in requiring of virtue the little temporary sacrifices 
which it may be called to make to duty, has not abandoned 
the virtue which he is training by such voluntary sacrifices, 
for excellence, to which every thing that can be sacrificed 
on earth is comparatively insignificant ; it is then that we 
learn to enjoy with a delight which no others can feel, and 



/ 



524 



CONCLUSION. 




to suffer almost as others enjoy; that even the aspect of 
nature itself appears doubly beautiful in our eyes, and that 
every thing which it presents becomes, in one sense of the 
word, our own, as the work of our God, and the dwelling 
of those whom we love. 

" He," says Cowper, speaking of such a mind, 

He looks abroad into the varied field 
Of Nature, and though poor, perhaps, compared 
With those whose mansions glitter in his sight, 
Calls the delightful scenery all his own. 
His are the mountains, and the valleys his, 
And the resplendent rivers. His to enjoy, 
With a propriety that none can feel 
But who, with filial confidence inspired, 
Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye, 
And smiling say, " My Father made them all." 
Are they not his by a peculiar right, 
Whose eye they fill with tears of holy joy, 
Whose heart with praise, and whose exalted mind, 
With worthy thoughts of that unwearied love 
That plann'd and built, and still upholds, a world, 
So clothed with beauty, for rebellious man ? 1 



1 The Task, book v. 



EDINBURGH : 
Printed by William Tait, 107, Prince's Street. 



